


The Scourge of Trion

by ellen_fremedon



Category: Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures, Torchwood
Genre: Long, M/M, Politics, Pre-Children of Earth, Space Opera, season 4.5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-10-23
Updated: 2009-10-24
Packaged: 2017-10-02 13:14:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 28
Words: 94,279
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellen_fremedon/pseuds/ellen_fremedon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Why is it always small consumer goods? I can't name a single planet-- well, not more than two or three... dozen-- ever successfully conquered through small consumer goods. But whenever it's you lot, every would-be conqueror takes one look and breaks out the transistor radios."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings:** Nothing as a major plot element, but there are some potentially-triggery events mentioned in passing, or taking place offstage. See [endnotes of final chapter](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6749#chapter_28_endnotes) for details, or email ellenfremedon@gmail.com
> 
> **Canon:** If you've been following New Who, you should know everything you need to know to follow this story, though oldschool knowledge is rewarded. If you would like more background, try [Wikipedia's entry on Vislor Turlough](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vislor_Turlough).
> 
> **Timeline:** Set between "Planet of the Dead" and "Children of Earth."
> 
> **Thanks:** I'm very grateful to my betas, Fox, Sanj, and Oracne. Thank you for your insight, moral support, and exemplary patience.

The trouble with staking out a warehouse, Sarah Jane decided, was that it offered far too many hiding places, and far too few _good_ ones. She threaded her way between a grand piano and a too-low wall of canvas bags, smelling coffee in the darkness, vanilla beans, black tea. Those would certainly be Carbry's goods, and Carbry himself might arrive any second. But further back were bales of fabric, stacked in flats almost to the ceiling—a tenant's wares? Carbry had been buying silk and Irish linen, but surely not in such quantities...

Iridescence flashed on the fabric, scrolling here and there, picking out moirés and writhing paisleys. Despex, then. Sarah Jane touched her scarf, dialed to matte black-on-black, and was reassured; her quarry had not been buying up anything as ubiquitous as the programmable fabric . She ducked into the first aisle between the towers of cloth.

And immediately flattened herself against a bale, instinct telling her to hold very, very still. "I'm not armed," she mouthed, slowly, clearly.

From down the aisle came the _thwuck_ of a gun safety being carefully re-engaged. "Good thing I am, then."

"Mickey?" She craned her neck and there he was, taking her arm.

"Don't touch anything," he warned. "This way."

He led her down narrow aisles, walking sideways to avoid the baled cloth; she followed, likewise. "Is this Torchwood business, or are you freelancing?"

"Both. Thought you might show up, though," Mickey whispered, at one crossing. "The gang's all here now."

"What, UNIT too?" They emerged into an open space where a few pallets stood empty.

"I'll have you know, we were here first." And there was Martha Jones, crouching just in view of the service lifts, with two soldiers in UNIT berets. "Sergeant Patel—" the one in the night-vision goggles saluted— "Corporal Hodges; Sarah Jane Smith. Don't touch the fabric."

"Why, what is it?"

"Despex."

"I know that."

Martha turned and looked at her, properly this time, and ripped the scarf from Sarah's neck. "Specimen box." Corporal Hodges produced a hard clear plastic container, and Martha sealed in the scarf.

Sarah's eyes had acclimated to the dark, and she could see now how the others stood, drawing in on themselves like explorers in a sewer, or a carnivorous forest.

"If you don't know about the deaths—" began Martha.

"—or the power spikes—" added Mickey.

"Then what brought you here?"

"Legitimate journalism, believe it or not," said Sarah, "and I've heard about both, actually."

Martha raised an eyebrow. "Journalism?"

"Well, tracking aliens doesn't pay the bills," said Sarah. "Mattias Carbry— retired solicitor, owns this warehouse—turned me down for an interview last year. I wanted to get a look at his art collection. Ever since the seventies, he's been buying up minor artists from well-known schools— obscure Impressionists and such—and none of the pieces has ever turned up at auction. It would be an impressive collection if he'd kept it all. But ever since I contacted him, he's all but disappeared from the art world—publicly, at least. He's kept buying through agents. I looked into it and found out that art wasn't the only thing disappearing into this warehouse."

"Third-hand Bösendorfers," said Martha.

"And wines, chocolate, spices. Decent quality, but not high-priced. And all vanishing from the record; I can't find documentation of Carbry and his associates ever selling anything, except gems and gold. I came here expecting to expose a very well-hidden relabeling scam."

"Turning cheap champagne into Dom Perignon," said Mickey, "that sort of thing? He might be, at that."

"Yes, but that's hardly UNIT's affair, is it? Or Torchwood's." Mickey and Martha shared a look. " I know there's been a rash of killings in the neighborhood," Sarah ventured, "but I shouldn't have thought they were connected, to one another or to Carbry." Sarah could think of at least six murders in the last six months, and several more accidental deaths; but Carbry had owned the warehouse since 1978, and it had never before attracted more than its share of trouble.

"Two people strangled," Mickey said, "two more smothered, one exsanguinated, and that one girl with her neck cut to ribbons."

"Two of those, actually," said Martha. "Both with the cranial nerves dissected. All within a 400-meter radius of the north corner of this building. They were all carrying some kind of wireless electronic device."

"Good luck finding a corpse that isn't, these days— "

"And all of them wearing Despex."

Sarah glanced at her scarf in its specimen box and swallowed. "Good luck finding a corpse that isn't." The scarf was a particularly nice one, preset with forty patterns, largely the more expensive prints and ombres. But half of London seemed to own one like it, or a programmable t-shirt or jersey or dress. "Killer neckties," she mused.

"First the shop dummies, now the clothes," said Sergeant Patel. "I think something up there wants us naked."

Martha said nothing, rather pointedly; the sergeant adjusted his goggles and resumed staring at the lift doors.

Sarah cleared her throat. "What are you expecting to find?"

Martha checked her watch. "There's a regular pattern of energy buildup and discharge from this warehouse; a major spike every eighty-four to ninety days—"

"And a smaller one ten to fourteen days later; I've been monitoring."

"So then we're expecting the same thing," said Martha. "To find out what happens." She flashed a brief and wicked smile. 

.

They waited half an hour before Carbry showed. He entered from the office door, with two followers in coveralls. The three men wound along the rows of spices and teakwood and crated canvases by torchlight, making a brief but thorough inspection, and then called the lift.

It rose with a pneumatic hiss, and opened on a dim interior with a pop of equalizing pressure. Its walls were very thick, and studded with dials.

The piano went in first; the two workers maneuvered it precisely against the doors, and it slid into the lift with only inches of clearance all round. Next came bags of coffee— the aroma of the beans rose as they were thrown and crushed into the corners of the lift cage— and then canvases, stacked neatly atop the piano lid. When the lift was jammed to the gills, Carbry shut the doors with another hiss of air and pressed the call button, but the lift did not rise or descend, only lit up in a sudden actinic flash. The doors opened again on a larger interior, brightly lit and hung with gray padding.

"That was a transmat pod," mouthed Sarah. Martha made a short, negative headshake— not disagreement, but a call for silence.

After a few minutes— about the time it would take to unload the pod, Sarah guessed— Carbry shut the lift doors and called it back, and the workmen loaded it again. Three more trips saw everything off but one large canvas and a Persian carpet; they leaned these against the pod walls and waited, perching on cargo pallets and conversing—almost out of earshot, but not, Sarah was certain, in any language she had ever heard.

The workmen waited. Carbry tapped his fingers impatiently against the lift doors; someone or something was late.

Minutes passed, and then the hum of a car engine— and an expensive one, or Sarah missed her guess— rose outside the street doors, purred into near-silence, and rose again and died away. One door opened on well-oiled hinges and shut with a thud, and one set of footsteps approached, briskly, high heels ringing against the cement floor. Sarah Jane froze as they passed the outlet of the aisle, but the footsteps never slowed, and she felt no gaze; and as the woman came into view, walking through the empty space where Carbry's goods had been, she looked neither left nor right.

She was slender, in narrow trousers and a fitted coat, and wore a gauze scarf over her hair and wide sunglasses, even indoors, even at night. In the dimness Sarah Jane could see nothing else, but the look— Katharine Hepburn from the neck down, Jackie O from the neck up— was both all the paparazzi had ever captured, and the invariant trademark, of Despina Norman, the reclusive sole owner of Despex Ltd.

Beside her, Martha stiffened.

Well, whether it was Norman or an imposter, there was certainly no legitimate business reason for her to meet with the landlord of her warehouse at two in the morning under cover of darkness. With her alien landlord. Who seemed to be running an export business in Terran luxury goods.

The woman's conversation with Carbry was brief and largely inaudible, until something she said angered him. Then Sarah heard "jeopardize my position," and "recognize the value of circumspection" and "overweening ambitions," all in English.

Norman, or whoever the woman was, leaned close to Carbry and peered over the tops of her sunglasses, speaking inaudibly. Sergeant Patel started, and Sarah wondered what he had seen through his goggles, but the woman had turned away, face hidden in her scarf. She stepped into the transmat pod and the doors closed behind her.

.

They waited another tense and silent half hour to let Carbry and his men get well away before emerging from the bales of Despex. Sarah Jane and Mickey followed the UNIT crew to their van. She and Mickey had left their vehicles in the other direction entirely— on the same street, as it happened, and Corporal Hodges threaded a maze of narrow alleys and took them there.

"So," ventured Sarah. "Harmless import-export business?" She didn't quite believe it herself, but she felt strongly that the idea should be on the table.

"Could be," said Mickey. "But if the power surges are nothing to do with the killings—"

Martha shook her head. "We don't know that yet."

"—and we don't know what killed all those people yet, either," Mickey said. "Still need to keep an eye on this place, even if Despina Norman's just a harmless alien."

Martha cocked her head. "She looked pretty human to me; more than Carbry. Sergeant Patel, did you get a good look at her?"

Patel looked up from the goggle rig in his lap. "It's the sodding frame-by-frame," he said. "I got a glimpse, that's all, and I swear there was something familiar about her, but the playback's shot."

"We'll get the video," said Martha, in what Sarah was coming to think of as her soldier voice. And, with less certainty, "I'm sure Carbry must be breaking some civil laws— exporting some of that stuff out of the UK must take permits I really doubt he has— but that's hardly a call to go in guns blazing. And there could be a Despex connection to those deaths, without it being planned."

"Just a consumer protection issue? That's possible," said Sarah Jane.  She frowned. "You know, I've been turning over Despex and strange deaths in my head, and I'm sure I recall reading about an industrial accident recently."

"Could you find it again?" Martha asked. "I think tomorrow, Torchwood here and I will be paying some calls."

"You take Carbry," said Mickey, knocking the ammunition out of his gun. "I'll take Despex."

"You do realize, we will need to check out the design house," said Martha, "and not just the textile mills."

"Yeah." Mickey wiped down the unused weapon with a pristine white handkerchief and holstered it again. "And the more detailed a report I bring back on their fall menswear line, the longer I stay off Ianto's shit list."

"Fair enough," said Martha. "I understand red is his color."


	2. Chapter 2

_Nine Months Ago:_

The day the freighter returned to Great Trion, on its first Terra run since that world's sudden vanishment and equally sudden reappearance, Turlough made a point of closing the office on the bell of evening. It didn't do to let one's employer think one couldn't handle matters in her absence without late nights and such fuss; and if he tracked the ship's berthing from his flat's comms—if he took home a sheaf of work, specs for the Trion asteroid docks and timelines for rebuilding the Terran factories—no one needed to be any the wiser.

Nor did anyone need to know how late he stayed up to get through it all, when every mention of the Terran catastrophe set up a refrain in his head: _Daleks. Daleks. Daleks_. He barely slept, and what sleep he had was full of old dreams he had tried hard to forget.

But he came in early next morning all the same, though not early enough to beat Despina in. She was pacing her usual circuit, from open glass door to narrow balcony to terminal screen and back, dictating to the computer in full view of the bustling court below and the windows of the Ministerium on its other side.

He returned all his files to their places, made tea for them both, and perched on her empty desk to drink his. "So, what did you bring me from Earth?"

She peered down her slender nose at him. "If you'd stopped in your office before your tea break, you'd know." 

"Aside from the crate of magazines. And the two hard drives. You know, they make them more than twice that size now; you could bring me the fashion blogs _and _the money blogs on one."

"And fill the space with another pound of cargo? I hope you haven't talked tea prices up that high—it won't pay, not in the long term." She sipped her own for punctuation, her face a perfect blank.

"Oh, but it will—in my improved performance and loyalty." He got a hint of a smile out of that.

"No doubt." Despina skimmed a hand into a pocket that couldn't have held even a tea bag without ruining the line of the suit—and it still amazed him the things he noticed now, reading fashion mags for a living—and produced a chit for a cargo lockup. "Go down to the landing docks and see to the offloading; your bonus is clearly labeled." She looked from his cup hand to his saucer hand and laid the chit down on her desk. "But do finish your tea first." He did, and she watched him drink it, arching blond eyebrows. "You could ask for something else next quarter, you know. Surely tea wasn't all you developed a taste for on Earth."

"Oh— the _Times _crossword. You know, it's very hard to plan for the British market when you bring me so little British media."

"My plans are on a grander scale than that," she chided. "Are none of your tastes? No grand designs?"

He swirled the sodden leaves in his cup. "I was living there as a schoolboy, you know."

"Mmm. In my experience, schoolboy habits are the hardest to break."

Turlough dropped the cargo chit into his own pocket, making sure Despina noticed that he'd followed her advice and got himself a new suit. "And your generous salary lets me satisfy the rest of my schoolboy tastes on my own, thank you."

"Then go and earn it. I'm not here to subsidize your taste for schoolboys," she said, cradling her own teacup demurely, "not unless I get to watch."

"I believe that came perilously close to harassment. What do you do on the return trips, if you never open those magazines?"

"That's what I pay you for." She handed Turlough her empty cup, a clear dismissal, and he went.

.

Turlough took the time to loiter properly at the ground port and hear all the gossip there was to be heard. There wasn't nearly enough— the Trion outsystem fleet had never rebuilt to its pre-war extent, and nearly all the news was maddeningly local: Gheschi raids, Androzanian land-grabs, Cyrrhenian brinksmanship, Kossikane expansion. But from the very edges of the pocket empires, and would-be and has-been empires, the rumors were unchanged— Dalek saucers, appearing by ones and twos, damaged but deadly. The rumors were few and garbled, but unmistakable.

But even in the seediest taverns, rumors were all he heard, and recent ones at that. The spacers' yarns and tall tales that the whole world had forgotten along with the Daleks, five years before— those had stayed forgotten, by everyone, it seemed, except Turlough.

And his employer, he thought. Despina had never talked about the Daleks, but her face, when Earth had returned and Carbry sent news of the invasion, had been white and stricken, as he had never seen it before; and she had been working in a whirlwind of plans ever since.

And speaking of his employer— Turlough initialed the last manifest, took his tea—four pounds of it, generous indeed at the prices it was fetching— and headed for the trams. On his way off the loading floor, the port-master flagged him down. "Mr. Turlough. Your firm has yet to file the final plan for its orbital stations. Those construction lighters don't leave dirt until all plans and specifications are on file, and that's the rule; I can't bend it for you."

That last was a lie, but Turlough did not call him on it. The man still wore his regimental rings—copper and green; the Fourth President's Own—thirty years after the war; he wouldn't bend rules for a Turlough. Not even one who worked in offworld trade, not even one who looked—who _was_, in point of fact—far too young to have served. "Of course," said Turlough instead, smiling tightly. "I'll see you get them. Today."

.

Planning the new orbital docking facilities had been Despina's project—that was how she amused herself on the ship to Earth, not reading back issues of _Vogue_ and _Cosmopolitan_— and Turlough returned to the office with every intention of simply relaying the port-master's message. But Despina was gone, and out her office window he saw her strolling the Ministerium colonnade with the minister for trade. He waited a moment, but at the end of the walkway they passed indoors, to an office wing, and he knew better than to expect her back soon.

So he sat at her desk and opened the planning file, the one he suspected she knew he knew the keys to, and took out the plans himself.

They had grown vastly more detailed, since the last time he'd seen them.

When Despina returned, Turlough was at her drafting table, redrawing the prints. She stopped in the doorway, breathing hard and staring at the back of his neck. Turlough felt his ears going red, but he kept his eyes on the plans. "I don't suppose you'd noticed the port-master was a veteran, a President's Man."

She crossed the office at a measured step and kicked Turlough's chair away from the monitor. "I can't say that I had."

"Funny thing," said Turlough, not turning around, "but those of us who fought in the war, we tend to see it in everything." He felt her freeze, the rustle of her black skirt suddenly silent. _You know who stole Terra, _he thought. _You remember them too._ "For instance," he continued, lightly as he could, "I'm quite sure the port-master would have taken one look at the thrust vents and the arc of that corridor, and seen a gravitic rail-gun." He looked over his shoulder; Despina was utterly still, only the flare of her slim nostrils betraying her. "I'm sure it's foolish, but, well, we don't want to antagonize the man, do we?"

Despina looked past him, almost through him, and took in his changes to her design. "And the tertiary docking chamber and exterior loading platforms—no, the _retractable_ loading platforms—will allay these… unreasonable fears in his mind?"

"Along with some more… cosmetic changes to the spin ballast bays, they ought to," he said.

She leaned in close to the screen, tracing lines with one gloved fingertip. "You seem remarkably familiar with the appearance of a gravitic rail-gun."

"I built something similar during the war; several somethings," he said. "Though we always mounted the spin thrusters along these axes." He pointed, not quite touching her hand. "It improved maneuverability."

"Yes, it would," said Despina, "the way you've shown it here."

"Have I? Oh, my mistake." He flipped to a second and far more complex print. "Those shouldn't appear on the plans we actually submit. Which he would like us to do soonest, by the way."

Despina finally met his eyes; hers were very pale, and always made him blush when she turned them on him. "I confess, I'm impressed, Mr. Turlough."

"I do my best. We can't be too careful, after all," he said. "In such a dangerous universe."

It was too much; her face closed down even more. "Can't we."

"You should know by now, I care as much as you do about the future of this firm." He slid away from the drafting table with as much dignity as he could. "And all its endeavors. How is Minister Arnam, by the way?"

Despina's eyes narrowed back to lazy slits, and Turlough suppressed a sigh of relief. "Deeply invested in our future plans," she said. "And I believe you've earned an evening off. Go and treat yourself to a nice meal out; I'll finish these prints."

There was nothing to say to that but "Thank you," so he did. Despina was already resetting her passkeys as Turlough buttoned his coat, hiding the keypad but not even trying to hide what she was doing, and he took the hint and left; but she gave him a true smile as she bade him goodnight, small, sweet, and contemplative.

.

Turlough did as he was told; he went to a wineshop he knew where the cellarer was lanky and fair and fond of him, loitered until the end of his shift, and took him out for braised fish and yellow wine, hothouse fruit and custards flavored with Terran cardamom at forty corpira the ounce, and walked him home after dinner and stayed a while. But he left him asleep and returned to his own flat, and was glad he had; it was another bad night, as he'd known it would be. In his dreams, he drifted in null-g through the fragile, tunneled-out asteroids of the Less Trion rings, struggling to orient himself. But his suit gloves and boots were worn slick and useless, and the tunnel walls were impossibly smooth. He scrabbled for purchase, knowing that any moment now the spin thrusters would fire and the payload of rubble would come barreling down the curve of the tunnel. But every touch to the walls only spun him, head-over-heels, out of control.

 


	3. Chapter 3

"So, not actually the best idea," said Mickey, "just walking in and asking."

Sarah Jane juggled the phone in one hand and the water jug in the other, resolving for the nth time to switch to a headset model. "No luck?"

"Hung up on, put off, told off, and no-commented. No luck in records, either; Despina Norman never did anything but get born and go to school until two years ago. And no one she went to school with ever talked about her before two years ago, either, so take everything they say with about a ton of salt."

"Martha had similar results with Carbry and his agents," said Sarah. "Come round to the house? At least we can pool our ignorance." She headed upstairs with the water. Her own researches had gone comparatively well, but there was no point rubbing it in.

Luke and his friends lay on the floor revising and shooting rubber bands at one another. Martha looked up from her own phone "Mickey?" she mouthed.

"No luck. He's on his way over. Hello, Rani, Clyde." Sarah Jane picked four rubber bands off the floor and tucked them into her pocket.  

"We were using those," protested Luke.  

Martha _mm-hmm_ed into her phone. "But it's got to be an alias _for _something. Sort the files by year of birth and check out all the women her age if you have to. What—yes, go ahead, I'll wait."

She rolled her eyes; Sarah poured her a glass of water in commiseration. "Anything in UNIT's files?"

"Not on Norman," said Martha, "but it turns out Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart opened a file on Mattias Carbry. Back in 1983."  
"He'd have been retired a good while by then."

"He was." Martha flipped a few pages back in a pocket notebook. "He met with Carbry that spring over the disappearance of a boy, an orphan under Carbry's guardianship, from the school where Lethbridge-Stewart was teaching. Can you...?" She pointed her chin at Mr. Smith's wall facade. Sarah looked pointedly at the phone.

Martha sighed—they'd been over this before. "Look, Patel, just text it to me when you get it." She ended the call, and Sarah woke up Mr. Smith. "I don't know why you can't just get him to turn on silently," she said, over the computer's fanfare. "Certainly be easier to keep him a secret."

"I have tried," she muttered. "Mr. Smith, I need everything you have on a missing schoolboy named—"

"Vassily Turlough," Martha supplied.  "He was never found."

"Probably changed his name," suggested Clyde. "I wouldn't want to be found if I was called Vassily Turlough."    
Mr. Smith produced a birth certificate and a handful of school records. "Nothing after 1983. Not even police reports on his going missing. Was there anything else in UNIT's files?"

"A note that Carbry had been deliberately obstructive, and that Lethbridge-Stewart suspected him of being or harboring an extraterrestrial. And a recommendation that the search be halted. Reading between the lines, I'd say Lethbridge-Stewart knew what happened."

"And Carbry is involved," said Sarah. "Now, that is interesting. I've found a lot of disappearances connected with the Despex plants. I'll add this one to the list." She caught Martha's eye and frowned. "Does that name mean something to you? Vassily Turlough?" It tugged at Sarah's mind, like something she ought to remember, but she couldn't place it; and she couldn't remember ever having met a Vassily, when she thought about it.

  
"I don't _think_ so," said Martha. "Tell me about these accidents; I really want to end this day knowing at least one new thing."

  
 Sarah brought up the data she'd collected, news articles and police reports and inquest proceedings. "I found two more instances of deaths with the cranial nerves pulled cleanly out the base of the skull, and all within a mile of a Despex plant: one in Lancashire, and one in Argentina. Expanding to look at all deaths near the plants, I'm finding a pretty high accident rate, though a lot of these could be genuine industrial accidents."

"And that's good?" Rani looked over Sarah Jane's shoulder at the map that was forming, Despex plants surrounded by colored pinpricks.

   
"No; but these deaths might not all be related to the killings in London. But if we include everything that matches any of the deaths near the London warehouse, we find at least one suspicious fatality at every factory— that adds in Hyderabad, Johannesburg, and South Carolina. And then there are the disappearances." Many more lights sprung up, in yellow this time. "Workers going missing, and other people, locals, who were last seen in the vicinity of one of these factories. None of the local authorities are connecting them to any of the industrial accidents, but it's a lot of people missing— three in the last year near the Lancashire factory, four in Johannesburg. Even more near the others."  

  
"How are they being explained?" said Martha. "If it's not related to the factory?"  

  
"Well, police at the Lancashire site say people often wander into an abandoned coal mine near the mill. Let me see what I can find about the others."  

  
"Wait a moment." Clyde had joined Rani. "There'll be mines near the others, too, abandoned ones, I'll bet."

"How can you tell?"

"Look at where they all are— the Appalachian mountains, that's coal. South Africa, diamonds. All places people have been digging mines for decades, centuries, places mines have been worked out."

"You're right," said Sarah, sifting through results. "Old, abandoned mines within three miles of each factory; and the number of people assumed to have gone missing in each one has at least doubled since Despex moved in."

"Blimey." Clyde's eyes were wide. "There really was a reason to learn the principal exports of Argentina."

"So Carbry is sending grand pianos offworld somewhere, and someone who may be Despina Norman is going with them," said Martha. "And meanwhile, at Norman's factories, people are falling down abandoned mineshafts and having the nerves flayed out of their skulls."

"Mm-hm." They stared at the map. "What are we missing?"  

The doorbell and Martha's phone chimed simultaneously.

"That'll be Mickey. Luke, can you let him in, please?" Luke tramped downstairs, friends in tow, all of them hoping, Sarah knew, for a glance at Mickey's guns, though he knew better than to bring them into the house. Martha silenced her phone, and stared at it longer than it should take to read a text.

Mickey appeared at the top of the stairs. "Any luck?"

"Luck, yes; progress, no, unless Martha's got something new."

"Image from Sergeant Patel's night-sight rig," said Martha, "soon as it downloads."

Sarah talked Mickey through the map. "I think it might be time for some on-site investigation of these Despex mills," she said. "At least the one up in Lancashire. I could drive up tomorrow; I think a single journalist might have more luck than an official inquiry."

"Torchwood's not official," said Mickey. "And I'm not even officially Torchwood. I'm an independent contractor." He glanced at Martha, expecting a riposte; but Martha had gone very still, staring at the picture on  the tiny screen. "Martha, what is it?"

  
Silently, she held it out. "I know that face from somewhere," said Mickey.

Sarah looked over his shoulder and choked. "I should think so."

"Alternate universe, right? I missed a few things. So who is it?"

"Well, it's not the best photograph," said Sarah, "but it certainly looks like—"

"It's her." Martha's fingertips were bloodless against the phone, and her voice brooked no argument. "It's Lucy Saxon."


	4. Chapter 4

_Eighteen months ago: _

  
A long black car rolled down the pitted drive, and a black-clad woman stepped out and rang the bell of the Turlough of Turlough.  

The house was nearly empty. There were no servants these days, and Malkon, the younger Turlough, was in Actrion again, petitioning the Settlement Board on behalf of the Sarn refugees. It had been his quarterly ritual for the last ten years. He took his lordship over the aliens seriously; almost all the political capital his name granted him, he had spent winning rights for the Sarns: citizenship, the franchise, land grants.

But the elder Turlough took no part in that struggle. He had gone with Malkon at first, haunting the capitol spaceports in search of news. But for three years and more, the spacers' stories had not changed: the missing stayed missing now, and the dead stayed dead, and their compatriots' memories never wavered. Turlough stayed home these days, having long since despaired of hearing news of the one ship he'd sought. No one had darkened the house's door since Malkon had gone.   

The bell rang again, and this time it got Turlough out of bed, swearing. He stumbled to the window and wrenched up the dusty sash. "It's around the back!"

A neatly coiffed blonde woman looked up. "I beg your pardon?"

Turlough blinked. "Sorry. I take it you're not a stonemason."

"And I take that you are Vislor Turlough? May I come in?"

"Give me a moment," said Turlough. And, gesturing at the marble plinth behind her, "Have a seat."  

He dressed in yesterday's clothes— and the day before's, but he didn't care to search for anything else— tramped downstairs and unlocked the great front doors. They had been shut even longer than the window-sash; dust billowed around him as he pushed them slowly open. The woman was still there, and standing. She brushed dust from her sleeves and high collar with one black-gloved hand, one flaxen eyebrow lifted, and walked straight past Turlough into the house.

The ground-floor parlors were all empty, but Malkon's office was furnished and clean. He settled her there, on one carved straightback chair, and leaned on the back of the other. "Do you mind telling me what this is all about?"

She lifted both eyebrows this time. "Have all your visitors been stonemasons lately, Mr. Turlough?"  

"Mostly, yes," he said. "We've sold the ballroom wing for building stone; the quarrying crew will probably be coming in soon."

"Thane of Turlough, reduced to this." She raised one hand, the gesture taking in the bare windows, the threadbare rugs, and the molding stripped of its gilt.  

"If you came to gloat," said Turlough, "I had my fill of that in the detention camp." His branded arm itched, and he gripped the chair-back to keep from reaching for it.

"I came with a proposition for you, Mr. Turlough," she said. "How would you like to restore this place? And fund your brother's sallies against the Settlement Board?"  

"If you're looking for a figurehead for some scheme," he said, "I think Malkon's the one you want; he's the family politician, and the one who missed the war."

She did not even blink at Malkon's Sarn name, though all his opponents and allies in the capital called him by his birth name, Enzellis Turlough. Nor did the war reference surprise her, though Turlough looked and was Malkon's age, a dozen years younger than the youngest veterans. She met his eyes steadily and said, "I have done my homework, Mr. Turlough.

"Vislor Turlough, elder son of Enzel and Merrennis, thane and lady of Turlough. Military school at ten, after Enzel declared for the Governor in the succession crisis. Ground duty until the birth of a second heir, ship duty in gravitics and propulsion after, and commissioned a Junior Ensign Commander at age thirteen when the Governor started losing.

"Saw action at the Less Trion front and the asteroid belt aboard the _Abraxis._ Missed the invasion of Great Trion— and of this very picturesque district, in fact—" She cocked her head, framing herself against the tall window and the hills behind it, a figure in a landscape— "in which Merrennis Turlough was shot and Enzel and the infant taken into custody.

"After that, a most impressive war record— commendations for valor, commendations for merit, commendations for this and that." She made a moue as if challenging him to expand on his record, but Turlough said nothing.

"Taken alive when _Abraxis_ went down," she continued. "Detained in the Less Trion Lunar Detention Facility, tried, and branded with the Misos Triangle. Your father and brother were sent to prison on Sarn, but the Tribunal seems to have been afraid to risk killing an entire noble family; they kept you under rather closer surveillance. You were remanded to the custody of one Agent Carbry of the Offworld Services and sent into exile on Earth—of which you served three years before vanishing without a trace. And reappeared quite suddenly on Sarn ten years ago, having aged no more than a year or two— a gap which you have never explained.

"Since that time, you have lived at Turlough Hall, managing the reconstruction of the Turlough thanedom, seeing your serfs replaced by happy freeholders and enfranchised militiamen and selling off your home brick by brick to keep you in... well." She smiled more genuinely than she had yet; it was not comforting. "To keep you rather badly, as it seems."  

"I still don't see why I need to be here for this conversation," said Turlough. "Yes, yes, you have a proposition. If you know about that twelve-year gap in my life, then you know my gravitics is at least that far out-of-date; you could fling a washbasin across the polytechnic quad and drench twenty people with more expertise than me."  

"Oh, I have enough technical expertise for both of us, Mr. Turlough," she said, and patted her chignon. "It's your knowledge of Earth I care about."

"Earth?" He looked away from her face and scanned the black lines of her suit, her tall boots, her coiffure. "Are you human?"  

"I was born on Earth," she said, which answered nothing. "And I've negotiated a trade monopoly with Earth which I expect to prove very lucrative indeed; but I've no time to spare for, shall we say, the non-technical aspects of industry."  

"I've no experience with commerce either," said Turlough, but he leaned closer, and let himself smile a little.

"You know the customs of the world," she said, switching to an English as cultured as her Trion, "and the languages— I assume they taught you French, at that school?"  

"_Oui,_" he said, "_mais je le prononce très mal_." He shrugged as Gallicly as he could. "I can read it well enough; and a little Italian." English warped his tongue like a mouthful of sand, but he hadn't forgotten it, never would.

"I can offer you a handsome salary," said the woman, and named a remarkable sum. "You could bankroll your brother's ventures, rebuild Turlough Hall—if not quite to its former glory— and keep a nice flat in Actrion for yourself. I'm sure you must be lonely, here in the provinces."  

Turlough said nothing, pretending to consider, wondering just how much innuendo she meant by that last.  

"And of course," she added, "unlike politics, trade need not put one much in the public eye." So, rather a lot. But she was right; Turlough could get much more use out of that hypothetical flat in Actrion as a private citizen, gainfully employed in commerce, than as the Turlough of Turlough, fighting for his brother's people on the lees of the family fortune.  

Turlough had had ideas, though fewer and fewer over the years, of turning his fortunes around. He had considered starting a rebellion, leading the Sarns as they took up arms to seize their land and their rights. They had rebuilt the Turlough militia to a high stage of readiness, and Malkon was a charismatic commander. But he had seen where that route led.

He'd thought, as well, of running Malkon for governor of Great Trion. Enzel Turlough's son could raise enough onworld support to do it. But the rich outer planets, less damaged by the war, would despise him; and Turlough had seen exactly where that schism led.  

He'd never actually thought of trade, but it didn't seem like such a bad idea— like quite a good one, once she explained it. "The monopoly is on a programmable monofilament fiber. I developed it, with a grant of resources and facilities from the Trion government. They retain the onworld monopoly; I'm consulting with them on their development project, which  focuses on advanced stealthing and camouflage uses. I retain full offworld rights to the substance— Despex is its name— and I have just begun manufacturing operations on Earth. The profits from its sale there, I invest in items of interest to the Trion market, and the Trion income is returned to development, manufacturing, and transport. And payroll, of course."  

"And when the Earth people reverse-engineer your product? They are clever like that," he said.  

"Oh, they will, in time, but any boost to their technological development should redound the most to our benefit, if we are the established Terran trading house." She looked up expectantly.  

"And we're poised to snap up anything interesting they come up with. It's a good set-up, I suppose," he conceded, though his mind was well made up by now.  

"Don't try to haggle with me, Mr. Turlough," she said flatly. "I've named a price, and if you were not interested, we would not still be talking. Shall we draw up a contract now? Or will a handshake suffice, until you can join me in Actrion?"  

"A handshake should do," said Turlough, because he wasn't a fool, and he was still going to look this woman up, no matter how few doubts he still harbored. "I look forward to working with you— Miss...?"  

"Norman," she said. Her gloves were smooth and glossy, the leather so fine he could feel the outlines of a ring beneath. "Despina Norman."


	5. Chapter 5

Jack made the drive to London in record time. If—when—Lucy Saxon returned from whatever world she'd found to take her in, he was going to be there.

He'd helped to hush up her escape from UNIT custody. A public manhunt would only drive her to ground, the UNIT higher-ups had said.

She's dangerous, Jack had said. They'd both been right.

Lucy Saxon. She had come to see him, alone, maybe eight months into the Year That Wasn't. Maybe nine. He'd lost count of days, by that point, and started reckoning by deaths again. A hundred and eight. A hundred and nine after she'd left.  

"You're the one who can't die," she said.

"Dying's easy. It's staying dead that's the problem. I seem to have lost the knack."

She'd drawn the gun then, turned it in her hands, studied it from all angles—

"Whoa, whoa, point it away from you, away from you!"

She raised it, inexpertly, elbow out and arm drooping, and leveled it at Jack. "Better?"

He relaxed against the chains. "Still not good. You're trying to aim from the wrist. Let your arm do more of the work."

"Like this?" And she fired.

It took her four shots to kill him, that first time, though he'd have bled out from the third in a few more minutes. She came back the next day, and the next, until she could kill him reliably with the first bullet.

Up on the bridge, after, he'd taken the gun from her hands without a struggle; her fingers had slipped off, as clumsy and unpracticed as on that first day, and her face had been blank and mad.

And now she was at large in the universe, where she might lay her hands on any weapon in who knew how many star systems.

She'd had as much reason as any of them to shoot the bastard; with the Master gone, she might well be as sane as she'd ever been.

Jack didn't want to take that bet.

He called Martha again. "Is he answering his phone yet?" No need to say which _he_ they meant.

"Voice mail," she said, in a tone that would make a weaker man flinch. "Would you believe it? He's sent me to bloody voice. Mail." She sighed. "I'll keep trying, but if he doesn't show up, we're moving on the warehouse without him, tomorrow morning."

"Tell him that, maybe he'll stop screening his calls."

"He's getting a piece of my mind when he shows up, I'll tell you that much," said Martha, and hung up.  
 

Good as her word, Martha Jones. Jack pulled up into Sarah Jane's drive well after sunset, and found the TARDIS wedged into her garden, half atop an unpruned clematis border. Raised voices carried from inside; he slipped through the door. Mickey, leaning on the newel post, caught his eye and nodded, but no one else took notice:  not the kids—Sarah's team—leaning on the banister; nor Sarah herself, arms folded sternly and shoulders squared; nor Martha, who had the Doctor backed against the stairs and wasn't nearly through with him.

"A phone call would have done. A note. A voice mail, even—" he didn't even have the grace to look guilty— "to any one of us. As it is, it's just luck her grandfather answered the phone, or that none of decided to drop in unexpectedly."

The Doctor's voice was level and dead. "I didn't come here because of Donna."

"No," said Mickey. "You stayed away because of Donna. You left it to us to look after her."

And that did crack the Doctor's expression, fear flickering out behind the anger. "What have you been doing?" He glanced around the hallway, saw Jack and looked right past him. Counting heads. "She'd better not be here."

"How daft do you think we are?" said Mickey. "Don't answer that."

"Donna's in Timbuktu," offered Clyde.

"That was last week," corrected Rani.

"Seriously?" The Doctor turned to Sarah Jane. "Really, Timbuktu?"

Sarah smiled, though she didn't unfold her arms. "Tom's relief organization—Martha's Tom, that is—needed an office manager; we found her resume online. All very hands-off."

"An office manager for Timbuktu?"

"For London," said Martha, "but they're sending her round to the field offices this month to set up their new logistics system. Her system, I should say."

"She's been blogging the trip," said Luke. "None of us comment, though."

"Donna's safe," said Sarah, "she's away from anyone who could trigger her memories, and she's hooking pediatricians up with jeeps and generators."

"And camels," added Luke.

"That's brilliant." Even the Doctor's hair seemed to relax. "That really is, that's brilliant."

"We do our best," said Sarah. "Jack, stop hovering; come in and sit down." And that was their cue; greetings all round, everyone friends again. No strangers came out of the wainscoting to join them all; and out Sarah's picture window, Jack could see that the TARDIS was dark inside. The Doctor was still traveling alone.

Martha would have words with him over that, too, Jack was sure; but for now, she opened her phone and passed it to the Doctor, silently, and he stared at the picture until the screen shut itself off.

Jack leaned over his shoulder and, when the Doctor made no move to keep it, took the phone from his hand. Even green in the infrared picture, and with her hair down and shorter, there was no question that it was Lucy Saxon. "So she's Despina Norman?" he said, and laughed. "Think how ashamed her parents must be, having a daughter in trade."  

Martha arched her eyebrows at him. "Worse than having a daughter brought up on charges as an accessory to alien war crimes?"

"Oh, I don't know," muttered Sarah Jane. "I've interviewed Lord Cole."  

Luke held out his hand for the phone. "May I see?" The kids clustered around him and looked on.

"Saxon— Norman," said Rani. "I guess it's her private joke."  

"But then she should be calling herself Despina Jute," said Luke. "Or Dane. Or Jute-Dane."  

"Right." Clyde rolled his eyes. "Because I'd want to lend money to a Despina Jute-Dane. There's a name that inspires confidence. That's worse than Vassily Turlough, that is."  

The Doctor lifted his head from his hands. "Turlough?"  

Martha retrieved her phone and stowed it in a pocket. "The name came up while we were looking into Norman's— Saxon's— Doctor, she's got an offworld contact, maybe several, and a transmat link. She's out there, Doctor. She's up to something."  

The Doctor's eyes were suddenly old, old and mean. "Show me."   

.

Sarah Jane made tea, and Luke went and fetched his Despex necktie and quarantined it in an old aquarium, and they all trooped up to Sarah's attic, a room that always made Jack uncomfortable. He had thought it was simply the alien tech, left lying out where any of the kids could and did pick things up and play with them; but watching the Doctor take it in, his eyes lighting up at everything, Jack thought, _Tosh should have lived to see this. _

He shied away from the thought, reflexively, and made himself pay attention while Sarah Jane and Martha explained about Despina Norman and the transmat pod and the deaths. The Doctor listened, not saying much, leaning over Luke's aquarium and zapping the tie's control strip with his sonic screwdriver.  

"And you said something about Turlough— Vassily Turlough— what was that again?" _Zzzt._ The tie broke out in Royal Stewart.  

"Came up in Carbry's UNIT file," said Martha, and read off the dossier.  

"Ah, aha, it is Turlough! Fancy that."

"You know him? The schoolboy?"  

"Before your time. After your time," he added to Sarah, at the same time Sarah said "I met him!"  

The Doctor boggled. "You did?"  

"Very briefly. On Gallifrey."

"Wait," said Jack and Martha, in unison. Martha stared Jack down and went on. "You've been to Gallifrey?"

"It was after we— after I went back home." Sarah was looking only at the Doctor, and the smile was off her face. "When you— _all _of you— were kidnapped from time. There was a Turlough with one of you I hadn't met yet. You remember."  

"Maybe not as well as you do— weird thing, meeting yourself. But, yes, Turlough! He was a political prisoner, exiled to Earth— a Trion— Carbry must be the agent who was running him. Solicitor, Chancery Lane, yes?" _Zzzt. Zzzt. Zzzzzzt. _The Doctor frowned down at the tie, while it flashed through footballs, golf clubs, and a dizzying series of regimental stripes. "So, Lucy's hooked up with the Trions," he said at last. "It's a good choice for an escape hatch— technological society, fast spaceflight, network of agents everywhere."  

"We think that Master set this up for her?" asked Mickey.

"Got to have," said Jack; "Lucy Saxon might have found out about the Trions on her own, but she wouldn't know how to invent something like that." He tilted his chin at the tie; it was paisley now.  

"Hmmm," agreed the Doctor. "It's quite clever, really— not actually a thread at all. There's a single-molecule monofilament core, and these incredibly tiny beads strung on it— like little prisms; they reflect different wavelengths of light from different angles. And they're charged. Give them a little static electrical push—" he demonstrated with the screwdriver: tie-dye— "aaand they rotate and make patterns. Nifty stuff; very, very tricky to get right."  

"Could the Trions have made it?" said Sarah. "Or, well, invented the process?"

"Oh, yeah. It'd be cutting edge, but they could do it. What I don't get is why they'd want to. High fashion isn't their thing— I mean, you should have seen what Turlough wore. Not that it looked bad on him. And not that I could have thrown stones in those days. Cricket balls, though— but, they're very..." he thumbed the screwdriver thoughtfully. "...very _Prussian_, the Trions. If they could manufacture something like this, I'd expect to see them using it for more... military—" He pushed the aquarium suddenly away. In the tank, the loop end of the necktie raveled into branching, reaching fingers, spider-web thin, scraping and hammering at the glass. "...applications."

"I've been wearing that stuff," said Jack. "I've been buying _Ianto_ that stuff." The threads stretched and divided into wisps too small to see, but the heap of glass shards in the aquarium steadily grew, and the gouges deepened, looping out into fluid arcs, geometric, purposeful. As if the threads were looking for something.  

"That must be how they killed those people," whispered Sarah. "Severed their nerves and... reeled them out." She knelt and stared, looking sickened. "That's horrible."

"It doesn't make _sense_," said the Doctor. "Why should Trion— any of the Trions— want to vivisect a bunch of textile workers and stevedores?"  

"Preparing for an invasion?" suggested Sarah. "Everyone's wearing it this year."

"Not anymore," murmured Mickey.  

"But why would they invade? They've been happy for years using Earth as a prison planet while they wait for humanity to get to be worth trading with. And in any case they've got pretty isolationist since the war."    
"The Time War?"  

"Nah, nah, civil war. Nasty civil war, very nasty." A strand of threads pierced the aquarium wall and hovered, waving, considering. The Doctor zapped it again, and it wove itself up again and fell into the glass dust—suddenly a necktie again, with a loose thread trailing near the top and a big round Hogwarts crest at the bottom. "Ooh, you get can get house colors!" he crowed. He peered over his glasses at Luke. "Ravenclaw, right?"  

"My son is never wearing that tie again," said Sarah, through clenched teeth. "If you want him to have a Harry Potter tie, you can buy him one in silk."  

She picked up the aquarium and carried it away—no doubt she had a quantum incinerator stowed up here; she'd need one, with the rest of this get-up.   

"He is a Ravenclaw, though," murmured Martha.  

"I need to buy one of those," said Clyde. "Killer necktie— you never know when that might come in handy."  

"Killer neckties," repeated the Doctor. "Why is it always small consumer goods? I can't name a single planet— well, not more than two or three... dozen— ever successfully conquered through small consumer goods. But whenever it's you lot, every would-be conqueror takes one look and breaks out the transistor radios—"

"Or the soft drinks," chimed Luke.

"Bluetooth," said Mickey.

"Right, or the diet pills, or the daffodils, or the—"  

"Daffodils?" This from Martha.

Sarah Jane answered, "Before your time."

"Hold on," said the Doctor. "That was before _your _time."

"We had daffodil men in South Croydon, Doctor."

Martha mouthed _Daffodil men?_ Jack shrugged. "I don't think that one ever made it out of the Home Counties. Nestenes, was it?"  

"Oh, well guessed. Nestenes, yes. And the Master." The Doctor's shoulders slumped again; but he told the story, and for a few minutes, the Master was only a story, and one that had already ended happily.


	6. Chapter 6

"Just this one pod?" said the Doctor, his ear pressed against the doors of the service lift. "You're certain?" He tapped along the lift doors, first with his knuckles, then with a tuning fork.

"That's all we saw," said Martha, "and the other lifts are just open cages."  

They'd worried the problem over until the wee hours with nothing to show for it but a pile of take-away containers. Sarah had finally shooed them out of the attic, sent the neighbor kids home and put the rest of them up for what was left of the night. Jack didn't sleep much these days; he napped on Sarah's couch for two or three hours, and then perused her library until dawn. He pulled his phone out of his pocket a few times, and once even brought up Ianto's number, but put it away again without making the call.

He dragged a chair to where he could see the TARDIS from the corner of his eye, but the windows stayed dark. If the Doctor was awake, too—and Jack would have bet good money he was—he wasn't in the console room, where he might conceivably have wanted company.

In the morning, wandering in from the TARDIS, the Doctor finally noticed the rest of Sarah Jane's house, the parts that weren't covered with alien bric-a-brac. "Oh, you have done well for yourself," he said, following the smell of breakfast into the kitchen. "Editors finally paying you what you deserve?"

"Surely I can't be the only one of your assistants to have made a few discreet investments."

Mickey clattered down the stairs. "You told me that would violate the laws of causality."

"Well, it would!"

"I never had the chance," said Martha, spooning sugar into her tea. She'd borrowed a blouse off Sarah Jane, creamy linen; it suited her. "Never a stock ticker in any of my futures."  

Jack swung his feet down from the seat of a chair to make room for Mickey. "So you just remember the brand names."  

"Hmmm— rags, uniforms, rags... I guess you could make a killing in the rag market."

"Maybe you should buy Despex," suggested Luke.   

"It's not publicly traded," said Jack. Luke took in the correction as he took in all facts, wheels spinning behind wide eyes. The Doctor cocked his head and regarded the boy as though he hadn't properly noticed him the night before—and Sarah Jane swooped in and distracted him with tea and logistics.

She hadn't told the Doctor everything, then.

Logistics didn't get them any closer to an answer, but it got them out the door. Sarah Jane went north, in a spiffy little car that Jack immediately and deeply coveted, to check out the mines. Luke went to school, with strict instructions about whom to contact and when if Sarah Jane missed her check-in calls. The Doctor dibsed the warehouse and Martha, and Jack attached himself to them and sent Mickey back to Gwen and Ianto in Cardiff.

It was not a fair or a reasonable division of labor, and Jack said as much when Mickey bristled. But if anyone was going to track down Lucy Saxon— however little of the blame for that year she might have borne—Jack was going to be in on the hunt.

.

The transmat pod, when they got it open, was empty, but it did have an autoreturn switch. "Not much more to see from this end," said Jack. "Should we check out the base?"

"Where is it?" said Martha. "Not in Earth orbit, surely?"

"We-ell," said the Doctor, looking up from the power readouts, "maybe in a manner of speaking. With this sort of range, it must be on the moon."  

"We're going to the moon?" Martha looked distinctly non-plused.

"Dark side," the Doctor clarified. "Well, naturally the dark side. I mean, you don't put your secret base on the side of the moon where people will see it, do you?"

"But it's a base, right. So there is air there?"

Jack found the right dial and pointed it out. "Oxygen meter. No worries there."

Martha traced the indicator needle with a fingernail. "Is every planet but us still using analog?"

"It's a design choice," said Jack. "Kind of a tired one. Bet you anything, the people who built this are still wearing jumpsuits with epaulettes."

"Hold on, you two." The Doctor shot the door bolts and threw the mauve return lever. His outline flared, bright against Jack's vision, and whited out in the familiar sheen of transit.  
   
Outside the pod, there was air, plentiful and suspiciously fresh. Someone had shelled out for the top-of-the-line scrubbers. A long, curving tunnel outside the transmat bay was lit by yellow emergency lights. No people in sight, no movement, no doors, even.

And Luna's one native amenity never got old. Jack stretched luxuriously. "Ah, point-sixteen _g_. Better than a face-lift."

Martha rolled her eyes. "Don't even pretend you need the help."

Jack grinned down at her. "Better than a Wonderbra, too."

"Oi!"

The Doctor cleared his throat. "I think there's a landing bay near the surface." He licked a finger and held it up to the ventilation currents. "This way."  

They went single file, Martha clearly trying not to bounce—hard to do; Jack had fallen straight into a low-gee lope—and the Doctor trailing his hand along the walls and frowning at it.

It was an unusual look for sublunar architecture, the tunnel's arc a perfect parabola and the walls varnished—no, polished, and marble-smooth. "Something wrong?"  

The Doctor shook his head. "Just a thought."  

"What kind of thought?"  

"A very nasty thought." He went along even faster, his long legs hardly touching the glass-flat floor.

They turned a corner and found a corpse.

It was human, a woman, with colorless threads hanging out of bloodless cuts in her bare arms and neck and legs. With a start, Jack realized they were her nerves.

Martha knelt by the corpse and calmly lifted its head. "Dead for a while," she said, "but hard to say for how long. I think she was like this a long time before she died."  

The woman wore a sleeveless overall, backless, industrial-looking, weirdly asexual over her naked torso. Her spine, too, was raveled through with gray filaments. "I thought it was just the cranial nerves that got..."  

"Vivisected?" the Doctor suggested.  

"Yeah."

"It was, on Earth," said Martha grimly. "This is new."  

"No."  

"Doctor?"  

"No, it's not." He pressed both hands against the corridor wall. "I should have known," he murmured. "It's very hard to get regolith that smooth. Very, very hard, and there's no reason to, unless— come on." He stalked past them both, stepping right over the corpse, retracing his steps. "Back to the pods."  

"But—"

"You can't help her, Martha. Come on!"  

He broke into a run. Martha followed, sprinting for all she was worth, and Jack drew his weapon and brought up the rear. They turned the corner; the man on the other side had his blaster already leveled.

Should have taken point.

.

The blaster's emitter rings glowed bright amber. The safety was off, then. Jack lowered his own gun, ostentatiously. "Drop it," said the man. "And kick it to me." Jack complied; the man holstered it without looking in the blaster's empty case; his watery eyes were narrowed at Martha.

"Mr. Carbry."

"Doctor Jones," he said. "I believe I told you that my affairs are not UNIT business."

This was the Trion agent, then. "Carbry," said the Doctor. "Do you know what built this base?"  

Jack shot a glance at Martha; she shook her head minutely.

"I built this base," snapped Carbry.

The Doctor blanched. "When? Recently?"

"Oh, we've made some recent— expansions, shall we say?"

The Doctor shook his head, helplessly. "I never thought I'd meet a Trion who could stand to— we? Who's we?"  

"My colleague and I. Our allies. They'll deal with you."

Martha cocked an eyebrow. "You and your colleague aren't exactly on the same page, are you? You accused her of, what was it, overweening ambitions?"

Carbry's bushy eyebrows knotted, and he leveled the blaster straight at Martha's chest. "Miss Jones, you have been even more of a nuisance than I had realized."  

"Whatever her scheme is, Carbry, you're better off out of it," said the Doctor. "She's quite mad. She'll betray you."  

"And so I should betray her, is that it? No," said Carbry.  

"Then just let us back to the transmat," said Jack. "We'll go, we won't come back, and we'll be out of your hair. What there is of it."  

"Go, yes, straight to UNIT," he said. "No, that above all I cannot allow. My colleague will deal with you." He gave a genial smile. "In fact I'm rather glad to have found you here today; you three have given me an excuse to rejoin her before she steals all of my thunder." He twisted the emitter to wide-field and pulled the trigger.

Jack leapt into the blast, falling through the stun beam as through treacle, seeing, not feeling, his fingers close over the muzzle. But Carbry was outside the blast radius, and moved faster, and the last thing Jack recalled was his liver-spotted thumb twisting the dial up to Kill.

 ~*~

The Despex plant was in an old cotton mill near Scarpton-le-dale, appropriately dark and Satanic on the outside. The inside was white and sterile; or the entry was, at least. Sarah Jane's cover story got her no farther than the security desk.

They were polite, if nothing else; the guard on duty called in the planet manager before sending her away. The manager was a genial, balding man called Addison. He had heat rash under his stubble, even in March; the factory floor must be stifling. Addison took her card and listened to her spiel, but she had not even finished talking before he shook his head apologetically. "I'm afraid it's just out of the question, Miss Smith: all press tours need to be arranged with the head office. Shall I give you their number?"                                  

So much for the easy way. Sarah drove back down the long drive— she'd have to stash the car at least a mile away— and through the outer gate. The guard at the gatehouse, too, was friendly and seemed human enough; in fact there was nothing suspicious about any of the staff, except that they all wore Despex neckties. And even that might just be a perfectly reasonable publicity move...  

She remembered the writhing, grasping threads and shuddered. No; the ties were definitely suspicious.  

She drove all the way to the village, parked the car behind the pub, hung her binoculars ostentatiously around her neck, and returned to the plant an hour later on foot. There was no fence, and only the roads were gated; within the gates, there were no guards in evidence.  

She walked openly through the heath, trying to look like a birdwatcher, until she came to a small ravine— a dry streambed whose waters must have been diverted into the millrace, centuries ago. This, she followed to its closest approach to the mill, keeping her head down and even crawling in places. She lay in the damp heather, chill penetrating her jacket and boots, and watched the mill walls through the glasses for a good half hour. One guard passed, twice, on a leisurely round. She waited until he cleared the corner of the main building, and she ran.  

The windows had broad ledges, but they were at least five feet above her head, which was good in a way; she'd be hard to see, if she stuck close. She started a clockwise circuit, the way the guard had gone, at about the same pace, looking for a leg up, and found it halfway down the building's side— a low wall, enclosing a short flight of stairs to a sunken basement door. She clambered up onto the wall, found the ledge, and edged around to the window frame and peered in.

After all the cloak-and-dagger, it was an anticlimax: Mechanical looms, electrical but otherwise hardly different in design than the first steam-powered machinery this mill had housed. Workers in coveralls, but no ties on the factory floor— they wore uniform baseball caps with Despex fronts instead. About half were still programmed with the company logo, while the rest had been hacked: football clubs, girlfriends' names, in-jokes.  

Hair was bundled up in hairnets under the caps, leaving the back of the neck conveniently visible. No one was sporting scars; no one seemed to have been attacked by their headgear.    
Sarah Jane took a few pictures and scooted down the ledge; the guard would be rounding the corner soon, and there was a pilaster two windows down to hide behind.    
The next window gave another view of the same weaving floor, and a glimpse through the ceiling at the spinning machinery— was it still called a jenny? She'd have to look that up— feeding glistening strands of Despex down onto man-sized bobbins. She snapped a few more pictures; there was a wall behind the bobbins, corresponding to the pilaster on the outside. Perhaps the next window would show her something new.

She inched around, hugging the brick, toes barely maintaining their purchase, and got a foothold on the wide ledge on the other side.  

Inside the window was a shabby room with a kettle, a table, and two men in security uniforms on their tea break. Oh, dear.  

The guard from the desk stared, shouted, pointed; Sarah jumped down, stumbled, and ran. She got a fair head start before she heard the shouting; the employee lounge must have been some way from the exit.

She risked a glance over her shoulder— four men, running fast, with—

A shot rang out, very near. With guns. Of course. She zagged, zigged, ran faster. Her binoculars pounded against her ribs with every stride.  

The next shot was to her other side; by the third, she realized she was being herded, and where to: down the hill slope below her was a shadow that had to be an entrance to the old mine.  

Five disappearances in the last year, she thought. But there was no other cover in sight; and the next shot tore up the turf at her heels.  

She came in over the top of the mine entrance, leaped down— oh, her knees would hate her tomorrow— and ducked into the adit. There were no more shots, but her pursuers' footfalls sounded closer and closer. She crept inward, back to the wall, reaching back with her left hand for some cover, a beam— ah! or a side gallery.   

There was still no sight of pursuit at the tunnel mouth; she pulled out her pocket torch and risked a light. Three side galleries; she left the first and took the second, which was lower, and would slow a tall man down.  

She heard, distantly, voices by the entrance, but they came no nearer. This struck her as a very bad sign. She switched off the torch and squinted in the near-dark. There seemed to be another tunnel opening off this one, just at the edge of sight; perhaps there she could strike a light again and get her bearings.  

She trod as silently as she could, pressing against the wall. It had been scraped exquisitely smooth— this mine had been exhausted before modern excavation machinery had come along, but someone had clearly expanded it since then. Her hand touched empty air; from far down the tunnel, a footfall rang. She ducked around the corner, and fell.  

A slide, not a drop, that was something, but a sheer, slick, steep slide, and she just fell faster and faster;  her jeans, her jacket, were almost frictionless against the polished stone. She twisted, banging her elbows and knees; the walls were narrow, that was something, and if she could just get her _feet _under her—

Ah. There. She hung, rubber-soled boots braced against one wall and her back against the other, breath heaving, heart pounding.  

Her jacket moved, swung, and out fell— oh, lovely, that would be her mobile phone. She listened to it clinking and scraping along the steep chute, waiting for the crack when it hit bottom. It never came. The sound died away into silence, and no answering echo rose.  

Oh, that was very bad.

Well. Down was clearly out of the question. Staying put, with no way to call for help, was no good either.  

That left up, back to the side gallery.  

The walls were just narrow enough to brace against, though her thighs wouldn't even wait till tomorrow to hate her. She twisted, slipped and slid, caught herself with both arms on the walls and both feet on the floor. She tried a step, bracing one foot flat— oh, ouch, and her calves, her calves were going to murder her. One more, foot on the floor, hands on the walls, arms braced, everything aching. It was like being a tree frog, if tree frogs hurt everywhere all the time; but she could do it, just.  

She had fallen, she realized, for less than a minute, though it had felt like hours. Climbing back up felt like centuries. Twice she slipped and caught herself on wide-flung arms and legs, and had to work to get her feet braced again. If only the ceiling had been low enough to brace her back against!  

She panted; she flexed her feet in their boots— she was never leaving the house without good boots again— oh, god, and at this rate she was never leaving the house again at all. But she could see the lip of the connecting passage now, if she craned her neck. She pushed herself harder, one step up, and another, and another, and— there!— she got one hand out onto the flat passage floor.  

She hauled herself up onto her elbows and crawled, belly on the ground, the last few feet. She fell gasping on the damp stone just above the chute, and lay there, catching her breath, aching, until the dampness had soaked into her jeans, until her fingers started to go numb. Still too sore and worn to walk, she rolled away from the deadly slide, flat onto her back, and raised her head into a dim light—

And, blocking it, a monstrous shape, glistening and chitinous, antennae waving: an insect the size of a man.


	7. Chapter 7

_Three months ago: _ 

  
Turlough always walked to the office. The shortest route took him down Abraxis Boulevard, past the flash and blare of newsbrokers at every corner. It was a nuisance in the evenings, and he walked home through Ministerium Park whenever he could spare the time, but in the mornings, it eased him into his day— inoculating him with the day's news in small doses, and letting him have his responses ready.  

Today, the news channels all seemed to be moving in the right direction. The vidscreen outside the Presidential Theater showed the meteor scare: footage from last week of Despina's orbital guns blasting it out of the sky, with a new graphic of trajectories and impact projections overlaid; but no one had found the impeller unit, so that was all good. The broker's at the corner of Attar Street showed the orbital station schematics— rotating wire-frame drawings of the satellites, with projectile paths arcing from near-Trion space to the Trion surface.  

In front of the Palace Hotel, the news kiosk showed a current feed of the Ministerium floor, the President looking harried and besieged, the Governor of Great Trion shouting from one side and the outworlds bloc ministers shouting from another. And in the court outside the Despex offices, the screens were running clips from Despina's press conference. Turlough stopped and watched the captions roll: _...say to claims that these stations could be used to stage a planetary attack?_

Norman: I say that I am appalled to be accused of even contemplating such a monstrosity; and appalled as well by the Ministerium's threats to appropriate or to destroy these peaceful— and privately held— installations. As this regrettably close call has shown us, if our elected leaders are unable to protect our world, then we citizens of Trion have a duty to homeworld and Ministerium, to commit our resources and our energy to the preservation of our realm.

[Applause...]

There were no vidscreens in the corridors and lifts, but there was whispered gossip, which was even better. Turlough closed the door behind him and sauntered into Despina's office. "They've called the vote," he said. "They should be asking you to stand within the hour."

She made a sour moue. "Why did I let you talk me into this?"

"We've been through this," he said. "Blatantly threaten to bombard Great Trion back to the stone age, and the outer planets will just dare you to do it. But show up an inworld, aristo president for letting you get this far, and they'll fall over each other to shake your hand." He leaned against the balcony doorframe and pointed his chin at the Ministerium building. "A dramatic gesture is all very well, but the electoral process has one very great advantage over waving a gun and demanding obedience."

She snorted, a delicate and nearly ladylike sound. "The veneer of legitimacy?"

"Institutional protection," he said. "An unelected despot can be toppled with no more ceremony than he— or she— came in with. A legitimately elected leader— whatever the circumstances of that election— has a little more breathing room."

Despina's frown only deepened. "I have set my sights a good deal higher than the presidency of the Trion League."

"The journey of a thousand miles begins with... well, in this case, with a particularly well-aimed bit of space junk and a very dashing bit of ballistics, I must say."

"Impudent boy," she said, but she smiled. "I still want to launch the Earth freighter in the morning; are the packets ready?"

"Ten minutes," he said, and ducked into his office.  
   
They'd shifted more and more of Despex operations into the hands of their Terran design house and marketers, but plans still crossed Turlough's desk for approval. He rifled through his files— stacks of Terran correspondence ready to go out, and one portfolio still lacking a stamp: the plans for the Despex line of business wear, slated to roll out in fall. Sketches, a few photographs, all good; market projections that didn't look too rosy to be believed. Turlough toyed with his APPROVED stamp.

At the end was a photocopy of the original sketches, marked with one line in Despina's hand: _No black? _Turlough snorted. Bernhardt, the head designer, had answered in three neat bulleted lines:

  

  *   
_1.) Despex is dedicated to making fashion new and exciting. Black = not new._   

  

  *   
_2.) Matte colors don't show the fabric to best advantage._   

  

  *   
_3.) With these lines, black is just too, too Lucy Saxon. _   

  



 

The name caught his eye. He approved the portfolio and packed it with the other folders, but the words still niggled at him, as though he'd known it and forgotten it. A quick search through the fashion blogs turned up nothing.

Turlough unrolled the vidscreen and sorted through the message queue, but the call for Despina resolutely failed to come. Answering correspondence didn't summon it; nor did last-minute edits to her prepared statements for every contingency.

Lucy Saxon. It had to be something older, but not too old, during the long gap between his leaving Earth and Despina's founding of the firm. Turlough sighed and excavated his crate of back issues—_ The Economist, Vogue,_ a miscellany of others— out of a cabinet. He'd finally sent to Carbry for them last year, after Despina had blown off his perfectly reasonable request for some recent history with a buzzword-packed speech about looking ahead and not behind. But they weren't indexed, and he'd barely opened the first one when the call finally came.  

He didn't think of the matter all morning, which was only natural; he couldn't let his mind drift to minutiae while Despina was signing on to the ticket, announcing her candidacy, taking questions in the colonnade; or during the far more contentious back-room debates that followed well into the night. And the next morning, he looked at the stack of magazines and could not even remember why he'd got them out— which was unlike him, but it was not every day one turned down a ministerial nomination to a well-favored ticket. He put the magazines away, and did not think of them again until after the election, when his new secretary began unpacking his files in the office of the Chief of Staff.

"Lucy Saxon," he murmured. "Does that name mean anything to you?"

"Sounds rather alien to me, sir."

"Yes, I'd got that far. Just curious, that's all." But curiosity made him drop the whole stack of magazines onto his desk, where he'd see them.  Days later, he found a moment to look for the name over lunch, though it was late afternoon and his blood sugar was so low he kept finding himself staring into his soup, the name sliding right out of his mind. He resolved to make time for breakfast in the mornings and turned another page. "Lucy Saxon."  

He found the picture before the name: Despina, unmistakable, at some sort of party, red velvet ropes in the background. _Ivory and black Tahari jacket_, read the caption, _worn by Mrs. Lucy Saxon, wife of British Defence Minister Harold Saxon, at a benefit for..._

Wife of Harold Saxon.

Well. That would explain why the name had rung a bell. Lucy Saxon's name might have been stripped from the fashion blogs— stripped deliberately, and small wonder— but Harold Saxon's name had been all over the business news: and his election, and his madness, and his death at the hand of his wife.

He took the magazine into Despina's cavernous new office, without knocking, and dropped it on her desk. "I suppose this explains your dislike for the legitimate political process," he said. "But it is possible to do it more sensibly, you know."

"Is it?" She had deigned to wear color, since the swearing-in; perhaps the wine-colored piping on today's black bodice brought out her lips, or perhaps her cheeks had gone even paler.

"Oh, absolutely," said Turlough. "I am terribly sorry you had to dispose of your husband, but, well— he doesn't seem to have left you much choice." She stared, silent. "I mean," Turlough continued, "he does rather seem to have gone after it more for the grand gesture than for anything else."

"It?"

"Power, what else?"

She rose from her chair and strolled to her windows— higher than the old ones, high enough to look down on the whole of Actrion. "And why do you think I've sought out power, Mr. Turlough?"

Turlough shrugged one shoulder. "The same reasons I've followed you into it. To escape others' control; to build a life to your own design; to promote your favored ideas, and favored people." He leaned against her desk, watching the pale reflection of her face in the glass. "Because no one else who's tried it lately is fit to rule."

"Such minor considerations." She shook her head. "You really have no grand desires after all."

"And for the fun of the game, of course," added Turlough.

Despina only laughed. "Oh, yes, the fun of the game! Ruling, Turlough, is not the game. The game— the fun of it— the grand purpose for which I have run that asinine_ textile company _and devoted hours to interstellar _freight haulage_ is nothing so petty as that." Her eyes met his in the glass: wide, glistening.

"Then for what?" he said. "Tell me. I want to know."  

She turned and laid her gloved hands along his neck, and leaned in close, breath warm and rapid against his throat. "Revenge," she murmured. "What else?"  

  
~*~

  
Jack came back to life in a too-short bunk in a cramped cabin—which was still better than he usually got—and with his feet in the Doctor's lap, which was a good day by any standard. Martha held his wrist, feeling for the pulse.  

"No mouth to mouth?"

"Ask someone who's not engaged," she said, but she squeezed his hand. Jack turned his most plaintive expression on the Doctor, who only smirked.

"How long have I been dead?"

"Day and a half, off and on."

"Off and on?"

The Doctor slid around in the bunk and draped his legs over Jack's. "Yeah. Carbry came to watch when you started coming round the first time; you got in a couple good kicks before he shot you again."

"There's a lovely memory I wish I had." He struggled up onto his elbows; oh, this had been a bad one. He'd have to get the make and model of that blaster. "How long to Trion? I assume that's where we're going."

"Three days, more or less."

"So, still far enough out to hijack this bucket. Bang Carbry on the head, turn the ship around, get the TARDIS back?"

"Tried it already," said Martha, "while you were out. That door's welded shut now, and Carbry's got the Doctor's screwdriver."  

"Lovely."   

Jack had never been to Trion, and it turned out, neither had the Doctor—just traveled once with a conniving schoolboy who'd been hired to kill him. The Doctor ran out of chatter about Trion early in day one, and kept clamming up in the middle of his anecdotes about the boy, Turlough—and wasn't that just fascinating. Jack tried to fill the conversational gap, but he and Martha together couldn't match the power of the Doctor's brooding, and they lapsed into uncomfortable silence.

  
The second day, the Doctor jackknifed bolt upright out of his slump and smote his forehead dramatically. "Despina!"  

Jack and Martha exchanged a glance. "I don't follow," said Martha.

His face fell. "No Greek?  

"Give me some credit for Latin, Doctor."

"They don't teach doctors Greek anymore?" said Jack, genuinely curious; not having consulted a doctor—about himself, at least—since 1896, he never seemed to be up on current medical practice.

"Yes, _medical_ Greek. But unless it's a body part, an inflammation, or a cutting, I don't know how to talk about it."

"Must make you fun at parties," said Jack.

She shrugged. "I know some prepositions."  

The Doctor glared at both of them. "Jack?"

"Sorry; I faked my Classical education. Why?"

The Doctor deflated. "_Des-poina_'_s_ a contraction of _demos-potnia_."

"I don't follow," said Jack.

"No?" The Doctor chewed his lip. "It might be coincidence. Probably is. Still."

That was all they got out of him on the matter, and almost all they could get out of him for the rest of the trip; whatever his coincidence was, it had him worried. He sat at the edge of the bunk, tapped his feet and flexed his hands, and then stopped making even that much noise, but stared silently at the door, while the ship groaned and screamed in atmosphere, and settled with a final thud on the soil of Great Trion.  
   
At last, even the ship was silent. After a long wait, Jack heard footfalls on the deckplates. "Doctor?"  

"Just wait."

There was the hum of a plasma cutter outside, and the doorframe began to rattle and glow. "We're not going to jump him when he opens the door?"

The Doctor raised his head, weary; his face looked hollow. "We wait."

"For what?" He caught Martha's eye; Martha shook her head, and didn't challenge the Doctor, but she stood up, stretched, and held herself ready for a fight.  

But it never came to one; Carbry shoved the door open with a gloved hand and beckoned, and the Doctor stood up and walked out. "The others as well," said Carbry— and, there, now he got angry.  

"You don't need them. Trust me, I'm the only one your_ colleague,_" he spat, "wants to see."  

"And I want the others," said Carbry. "Move." They moved.   

In the corridor before the airlock, Carbry cuffed their hands; a whistle sounded from the cockpit as he secured the Doctor's. He stuck his head through the cockpit door. "Of course she does," he muttered; and, louder, "Accept call."  

"Agent Carbry," purred a woman's voice. Hers, Lucy's. Martha's jaw clenched; and the Doctor's face could have burned a hole in the corridor walls. "Or, forgive me, I should say Minister Carbry. This is an unexpected pleasure." She did not sound the least bit pleased.

"If it's unexpected," snapped Carbry, "then I must not have made my terms clear enough. You will not buy me off with an in-name-only promotion. Madame President," he added, too late for anything like politeness.  

"I impressed upon you the necessity of your work on Earth," said Saxon.  

"Your commercial empire doesn't need me, Despina."  

"My commercial empire," she enunciated, mocking his clipped tones, "can go hang. My research, on the other hand, requires constant supervision."

"Then hire a researcher. For good or ill, you appointed me Minister of the Offworld Service and titular head of the Agency, and in that capacity, I am bringing three Terran spies to my office for proper interrogation."  

"Interrogation? On Trion? Are you mad?"  

"UNIT sent them to infiltrate the lunar base; madness would be to let them return to Earth."  

Silence from the radio; Jack could only imagine the staring contest in the cockpit. "Bring them to my office," said Saxon at last.

"When I'm done with them. Carbry out," he said, before she could protest. There was the _thwack_ of a switch, and Carbry stomped out of the cockpit and prodded Martha's back with the blaster barrel. "Into the airlock."  

Double doors, a long ladder, and longer walk across a cordoned-off bay of a bustling hangar—military section, and well guarded.

"President?" hissed Martha. "Of the whole League?"  

"I wouldn't have expected her to pick up a taste for politics," agreed Jack.  

The Doctor let out a single bark of laughter. "What else would she have done?"

No one had an answer for that.


	8. Chapter 8

The insect loomed. Sarah Jane recoiled. The insect took a step forward— it was bipedal, or at least it walked on only two legs— and waved its two long antennae. A purple glow took shape between them.  

By its light, Sarah could see the creature more closely. It had a gleaming dark carapace, deeply ridged, and a paler, more flexible underbelly— as if it had evolved to roll up, she thought. Its mouthparts and eyes were in front, fringed and complex.  

"H-hello?" she ventured, very quietly, but it didn't respond. "Not a talking bug, then? No, you just make that purple light. Is that communication?" The light expanded, an almost palpable glow, expanding and reaching out for her. Sarah screwed up her courage, reached out, and touched it with one hand.  

Bad mistake. Very, very bad mistake. Her hand was caught up immediately, and the glow rolled up her arm and enveloped her. She jerked back, or she tried to, but she was caught fast, and any movement except forward was like leaning into a gale wind. A force field. Or a gravity field, she thought, feeling herself falling straight forward as the insect pulled her along.  

At the side galleries, other insects joined them, and they passed Sarah Jane off between them, the glowing field around her somehow staying intact. She managed to lean into the pull enough to get her feet under her, and then she was running instead of skidding— and then another of those dreadful chutes opened and she was falling again, with an insect in front and another falling close behind. Her stomach churned, and she shut her eyes until the ground leveled out again.  

They traveled as far as a mile in the lower passages; perhaps more, if the grade of the inclines wasn't as steep as it felt. At last they came to a domed chamber, deep in the rock and more complex than the tunnels, with a reinforced ceiling and patterned floor, and machinery set up here and there on stone plinths. She recognized none of it, nor could even guess at the function of most, but there were a few machines on treads that might have been excavating equipment, with blades and rasps on circular mountings.  

There were more of the insect creatures here, some busy with the machinery, some seemingly idle. All were silent. "Hello? Hello," tried Sarah. "Can any of you understand me?"  

"They can't speak."

The voice came from high above. She tried to crane her neck, but the force field held her fast. "Why have you brought me here?" she called.

"I did try to send you to our head office, Miss Smith," said the voice. At one end of the dome, a lift platform was descending one of the chutes, suffused with the same purple glow that held Sarah. It stopped at ground level, and off stepped Addison, the plant manager. "You seem a charming woman, and I do hate to consign you to... well. There's a reason we posted the _No Trespassing _notices, you know."

"Tell me," said Sarah. "Tell me exactly what's going on."

"Oh, I'll do more than that." He crossed to a small lectern with a flat-panel control surface, installed beneath the apex of the dome.

"Well?" said Sarah.

"Give me a moment. I do so hate this part." Addison took a deep breath, chin quivering a little, and laid his palm against the controls. The tail of his necktie reared up, unraveled, and struck like a cobra at the back of his neck. He showed his teeth and keened horribly, while the wide end of the tie frayed into a thousand wires and plugged into invisible sockets in the control mechanism. He quieted with a gurgle and stood, breathing through his teeth and clutching the sides of the lectern. When he looked up, his eyes gleamed with violet light. "Now," he said. "I am— temporarily, as you see— the Gravis."

Sarah swallowed dryly, twice, before she got the words out, but her voice was shockingly level. "And what does a Gravis do, Mr. Addison?"

"I command. I command the Tractator swarm." He gestured, and all around the insects shuffled out into the light, encircled them, and stood at attention, save for the bob and weave of their antennae.

"I take it these are the Tractators, then." Addison nodded; the Tractators stood still.  "And just what do you command them to do?"

"No more than they would do on their own," he said— "to dig, to breed, to feed. I am their servant; their coordinator."  

"Mm. Aren't they lucky? And I suppose they'd run all of this machinery on their own, too?"  

"Well. There are several ways of looking at that, Miss Smith," said Addison. "In the normal course of things, they would have a Gravis of their own race, a technician, an engineer; and they are a highly accomplished people. Most of what you see here is of Tractator design."  

"I see. And what's the other way of looking at it?"  

"Well. The Tractators have been a spacefaring race since the very dawn of their existence, and they are accustomed to living among humans, or humanoid life forms."

Sarah swallowed. "And?"

"And their technology— their culture, Miss Smith— has developed in concert with the peoples around them. So, from a purely... mechanical standpoint... no, the Tractators do not run the machinery on their own."

Addison cocked his head at one of the excavating machines, and four Tractators scuttled back and wheeled it into the circle. Its front was studded with wires and connectors; of a sudden they began twisting and reaching, just like Addison's dreadful tie. "That, I'm terribly afraid, is to be your job."  

~*~ 

Turlough poured tea for Trade Minister Arnam, and another cup for himself. Malkon, as always, took tisane sugared almost to solidity; Turlough forbore to comment, but he measured his half-spoon of sugar with more-than-usual precision. "You won't hear this from the President," he said, stirring thoughtfully, "but we might want to lower our expectations concerning Earth."  

"She's not thinking of curtailing the tea trade, is she?" Arnam cradled his cup and saucer against his chest. "We do permit luxury markets for a reason; she mustn't blithely toss that kind of money back into—"  

"Never fear," interrupted Turlough, "your supply line is safe. But as for expanding the trade with Terra beyond luxuries—don't you think we've rather missed our window? A generation ago they'd have been hungry for Trion goods, and Trion guidance, but anything we sell them today, they'll best us at in another decade. There's still a good argument for keeping a foothold there…"  

"But it won't amount to anything more. I'm afraid I'm inclined to agree with you," allowed Arnam. "We certainly don't want another Kossik."  

"Or another Ghesch," said Malkon, and they all shuddered. The Trion commercial fleet had been pressed into war service, on one side or the other. It had been a long time rebuilding, with heavy outsystem attrition that the shipping records could not explain and the spacers could barely remember; and by the time the newest keels had flown, half the client worlds had lost infrastructure for or interest in trade, and the other half had built their own ships. Wherever Trions went now, they contended with Kossikane galleons and sleek Gheschi raiders.

"And the best way to prevent that," said Turlough, "is to rebuild our out-system interests, before the Kossikane do. With proper outposts, not just Agency branches. Enzellis—" he nodded to Malkon—"has the Settlement Board making plans already. They, and the President, would like the Trade Ministry's recommendations regarding prospects and priorities."  

"Where else to place a foothold? I've given some thought to that myself." Arnam sipped his tea. "Isshai Prime's a nice thriving little world--  they've had offworlders coming in for the scenery for generations, and a good location."  

"Not anymore, not unless we can drive the Gheschi out of the Azdan Congeries." Turlough curled both hands tight around his own cup. "The old route is impassable; there's a black hole in Kasterborous." A runnel of tea spilled over his hand, and he brought the cup to his lips and half-drained it before he wasted any more.  

Arnam cleared his throat. "I see. Clearly, I ought to be kept better informed. Custodian—" this to Malkon—"my office will draft our preliminary recommendations by week's end, if that suits."  

A single knock rang on the door, and Turlough's secretary slipped in without waiting for an answer. "Mr. Turlough, the War College sent those Despex reports."  

"Despex?" said Arnam. "Is there something about the Earth trade you don't want us to know?"  

"Hardly." Turlough took the armful of binders, with a short glare that Jasten entirely ignored. "This is all onworld development. Not my field, but I try to keep up."  

Jasten showed the Trade Minister out.  

"Arnam doesn't like you," observed Malkon.

"Arnam doesn't like that he can't have me recalled," said Turlough. He drank down the rest of his tea before it could go cold; it rasped on his scalded tongue.

Malkon poured another cup of tisane and remained, sipping it thoughtfully, while Turlough skimmed the Despex research.  

Revenge, Despina had said. She had reason to crave it— against UNIT, the United Kingdom, and the whole of Earth, probably in that order. Turlough had no objections, in theory—Earth had not treated him well, and even his memories of other times and places than his exile at Brendon were pleasant mostly for the good company. But it was Trion that had sent him there, Trions who had wronged him; Turlough's part in Despina's revenge began and ended with his loyalty to her.  

And she sensed that. She had searched his eyes for some answering spark, and, failing to see it, had kissed him once on the mouth, cool and almost obscenely chaste, and stepped away. "Nothing touches your self-interest, does it, Turlough?" Her smile was the truest she'd ever given him.  

"That's why you keep me around," he had said, and that had been the end of it—between the two of them, at least. But Turlough had thought hard on the matter. Despina had transport, capital, and power; if she wanted simply to invade Earth, or destroy it, she had the wherewithal.   

But now that she'd gained those resources, she continued to expand the textile empire she so disdained; and the War College's experiments went some way towards explaining why.  

The beaded threads, like thousand-bit abaci, could be connected to function as a crude neural net: rudimentary, but just sophisticated enough to support the programming of complex animated patterns. Or, according to this collegian's report, to transmit simple nervous impulses.  

The report described the test run of a stealth suit run by cameras. Following that came schematics for a control box that would plug directly into the visual cortex, to let the operator design his camouflage via semi-autonomous mental impulses.  

Turlough had seen enough circuitry schematics in the war to follow this one, just; and to his non-expert eye, every control mechanism in it looked reversible. Certainly, the neural impulses could be sent in both directions.

Well.  

He could think of a dozen uses for such a device off the top of his head, some of them even legitimate. Most of them less crude than simply threatening the Earth with orbital bombardment.  

He looked up; Malkon was watching him. "In your capacity as Custodian of the Settlement Board," said Turlough, "what would you do with a planet with a completely biddable population?"  
"Completely? How did they get that way?"  

"Assume you found them that way." Malkon frowned, suspicious. "Or suppose your colleagues did—what would the less scrupulous custodians in your department do with them?"

Malkon shook his head. "It all sounds rather far-fetched. Let me think."  

While he thought, Jasten slipped through the door and pulled it tight behind him.

Turlough slammed the binder closed "Do you never knock?"  

"It's Carbry," said the secretary. "He's here."  

.

"Herself's on a rampage." Jasten led them through the service corridors, shoes clacking on bare floors. "He hung up the comms on her, and she sent a full squadron of guards to bring him and the Terrans in."  

"Why couldn't he have interrogated them on Earth?" said Malkon, and Turlough didn't think he meant it rhetorically.

"Wrong kind of electrodes," muttered Turlough.  

"Vislor, I know you don't like the man—"

"And in other news, water is wet—"

"—but please try not to make this worse."

"Oh, don't blow things out of proportion." They came to the tower stairway; Jasten took the steps two at a time. "It's not a diplomatic crisis— half of Earth's governments haven't even recognized the existence of other intelligent life, let along regularized relations with it." Turlough, on his longer legs, caught up with Jasten and passed him. "And it's not an economic crisis."

"Well, that's a relief," puffed Jasten. "Anything as long as the tea is safe." The secretary had no stake in the Terran trade.  

"It'll blow over," said Turlough. "The other top men in the Agency are all allies; we can let Carbry take his place over them if he's so determined, and install someone more sympathetic Earthside." He held the landing door for Malkon and Jasten, and followed them through the warren of offices, security booths, catering closets and coatrooms behind the Presidential reception room—silently, for sound carried on the parquetry, and the walls rang dully with Despina's voice: "You and I will have words later, Carbry. For the moment, I would see these prisoners of yours."  

Turlough swung open the dais door on its silent hinges and held it for Jasten to kick in the stop, and from the shadow of the velvet drapes behind the hanging emblems of office, he watched a pair of guards lead in the Terrans.    


	9. Chapter 9

Carbry had caught three spies. A striking blue-eyed man; a slender black woman who walked with a bearing of authority at odds with her youth; and a gangly man in an ill-fitting suit, with unruly hair and a face almost too pinched and sharp for beauty—though only almost. The other two deferred to him, seeking his gaze over their shoulders, in between murderous glances at Despina's face. He did not seem to notice, any more than did Despina, who met his eyes almost before the door opened on him. Her hands rested, loose, on her chair, and her shoulders were level—a good show of unconcern— but Turlough could see tension in the flare of her white nostrils.  

The Terran man saw it too. "Despina Norman." He rolled the syllables out, in a South London voice unsuited to the name. "That's very good—I wasn't expecting you to repeat a language. Though I suppose you were bound to start running out."

"You," hissed Despina. "And Miss Jones, and Captain Harkness— I should have known."  

"So should I."  The woman— Jones— flexed her bound hands in front of her.

Despina took no notice. "You don't look pleased to see me."

His mouth flattened. "Don't. Don't even."  

"Aren't you the least bit curious how I survived?" Two spots of color had begun to rise in her cheeks.  

"Not any more," said the man, though the whole line of his body belied it, straining forward like a sunflower. "You always have some bolthole prepared. You escaped Sarn—" Malkon started. Turlough raised an eyebrow and he shook his head; after his time, then. "—you escaped the Citadel, and now you've escaped Earth. 'Course, you'd done that before, too. Still, bravo, good show, well done." He clapped his bound hands twice. Deathly quietly, he said, "Did she know?"

Despina made a sad little moue. "These humans, Doctor—"  

Turlough still had to repress a start at the title, and cursed himself for it. He almost missed Despina's next words:  

"—they love so _selflessly_. Haven't you noticed?"  

Both the others looked back at him, concerned, but the man's face had gone entirely blank. He swallowed; feature by feature, expression crept back over his face and body, as though he were an actor listening for his cue.

And finding it, in Despina's cool expression of triumph. "So you got the Trions to take you in." He bounced on his heels, tense as a crouching cat. "Nicely done. Wonder what you told them? Client colonialism, a long game, oh, very long game— I'll bet they liked that; they're very Prussian, the Trions. I'm quite certain you didn't tell them what you've got on the moon."

"On Luna?" Despina shot a glance at Carbry, who stiffened.

"I saw those excavations. And I saw what was left of one of their drivers."  

"Oh, so you've met our little friends before!" Despina beamed. "How splendid— then I won't have to educate you. My agent has employed them to expand the lunar base— by ones and twos, I most sincerely hope— but give me some credit. I haven't settled an entire colony on the moon; that would be foolish.

"I've brought them to Earth."  

"Earth?" He fell back to the flats of his feet.

"Deep below the surface," said Despina, " Thousands of them, swarming, digging and breeding in the deep underground."  

A shudder went through Jasten and Malkon, and Turlough thought he might be the only man on Trion who knew why. Carbry and the aides and guards shivered, too; the man, Doctor Whatever-it-was, noticed, and pounced.  

"They're scared," he said. "Even of those words, they're scared. Do you really think you'll be President when word of your _little friends_ gets out? You've got one agent on Earth, Despina." He spat the name like a joke. "You're going to need more support than that. How many Trions do you really think would ever collaborate with them? With you?"  

Despina crooked her mouth and let out a sniff of laughter. "Oh, more than you might think, Doctor." She turned straight to Turlough, unerringly meeting his eyes through the deep shadows. "Do join us, Turlough." 

"Turlough," the man repeated, and blanched. Turlough followed Despina's beckoning hand, right up to her chair. The man shook his head, slowly and then more desperately, as Despina ran her hand up the seam of his sleeve and rested it on his shoulder. "No," the Terran whispered. "Turlough, Turlough Turlough Turlough."  

Despina stroked her fingertips up his bare throat. Showing him off, thought Turlough, like a prize hound. Like the man knew not only his name, but who he was. Knew him.

It was impossible, of course, but Despina had given him the name; and Turlough held very still under her caress, biting down the on the word. Doctor. But he held it in, and looked down into Despina's triumphant face. "Madame President? Care to introduce our guests? I don't believe I've had the pleasure."  

The stranger stared, stricken and open, and in that moment he did look familiar. "Turlough, Turlough no. It's the Master—_she's_ the Master. Turlough!"  

Turlough swallowed hard, knowing Despina felt it. "The Time Lords are dead," he said.  

"Not all of them." He reached out with bound hands. "It's me, Turlough; I've regenerated, I survived. And so did he," he spat. "Please say you didn't know."  

"It's not possible." He would have heard. All those spacers' tales... Turlough grasped the back of Despina's chair, leaning out of her touch, and met her eyes. "Who are they? Really?"  

"No one of consequence," she said. "These are the human Time Agents who hounded my husband to Earth, and persecuted him into madness and death. Miss Martha Jones—"

"—Doctor," she corrected.  

"How lovely for you. Doctor Jones, Doctor—are you still going by Smith? And Captain Jack Harkness. May I present my Chief of Staff, Vislor Turlough."

Turlough nodded, almost courteously; none of them returned it. "Do all Time Agents have such boring names? Tell me your given name isn't John, Doctor Smith; rekindle my faith in humanity."  

"You know what I'm called." He met Turlough's gaze, a sudden shocking glimpse of anger, banked as soon as he looked away.  

"And we will know much more, in time," said Despina. "Guards! Detain them in the security corridor."  

The man twisted, shouting over his shoulder as they led him away, not to Turlough or Despina but to Jasten and Malkon waiting invisibly, and all Despina's guards and aides. "Tractators! Does that name mean anything to you, Tractators? That's what she's got on Earth—her slaves, her _allies_." The guards hauled him out the door, his two friends crowding at his shoulders. "Tractators! Tractators!"  

The light seemed suddenly dazzlingly bright; Turlough shut his eyes. Tractators. The door closed.  Behind the drapes, Jasten whimpered. One of Despina's aides repeated the word in a whisper. "Stop it," hissed the other. "Stop it, please, stop."  

"Not you, Carbry." Turlough forced his eyes open. The old agent halted, but did not turn. "Since you are here," continued Despina,  "it would behoove you to step into your office, just for the day. There are new staff and new policies you should take time to acquaint yourself with."  

Carbry waited just long enough for rudeness. "Of course." He made to follow the guards.

Despina gestured at two aides.  "Excellent. Show Minister Carbry to his new office." She watched them leave, and then twisted in her chair and laid both her small hand's over Turlough's. "You're cold," she said.  

He was at that. "Bit of a shock."

"For me as well." She stood, keeping hold of his hand. "Come."  

She led him to her office and put on the kettle, waving Turlough away when he tried to take charge. "I assure you, I can make very nearly as good a cup of tea as you can, Mr. Turlough." She pointed him to a chair. "Sit down, and drink."  

He did as she told him. He could feel her eyes on his face, but he did not look up until the cup was empty, and she took it from his hands. "Well."

"The Time Lords are dead," said Turlough. "I know that."

"But he still knew just where to hit you. Your lost years."  

"Did you?" said Turlough. "Know?"  

"The depth of your feeling? Not till today." Her eyes were cool and sympathetic, and human.  

"The rest?"

"The Agency keeps very thorough records."  

She was only so transparently evasive when she trusted him not to pry. He gave a weak smile, all he could muster, and took in a deep breath. "And very shoddy security, it seems."  

"Then how fortunate the Agency Head has returned to set things in order."   

Turlough looked down at his hands. "About Carbry."

"Yes."

"And the moonbase."  

"Ah."

"This word—Trac… Tractator? It frightens me, and yet I can't even hold it in my mind." He had never before lied to her—had never dared try, and he killed that thought instantly— dared not think, either, of why he did so now. "I don't understand. What does it mean? What did they see on the moonbase?" What are you hiding on Earth, he thought, and met her eyes full on.

"On Luna? Only a Terran worker." The familiar play of evasion again. He had never caught her in a direct lie and was not sure he would know her in one, but this much was true.

"And on Earth?"

"Mindless beasts, that's all," she said. "Mindless, but useful—and entirely under my control. The Tractators are no threat to us." Her voice rang with confidence; she believed what she said, entirely.  

Tell her, he thought. About Frontios, about why she's wrong. You argue with Despina every day. The Time Lords are dead.

"If you say so," he said. He shook his head. "I still can't shake a feeling of… trepidation."  

"You have been working very hard, my dear." She patted his shoulder, then straightened and smoothed his lapels. "Take the evening off. I'll manage."  

"Will you? Without me?"

The confident smile faltered, minutely "But only the one evening," she concluded. The warmth in her face was not feigned, and not bluster—and not there an instant later, but Turlough had seen it.  

"Only the one," he agreed, and bowed over her hand and took his leave.  

 

~*~ 

 

Sarah Jane tried to flinch, but the gravity field held her fast. The Tractator machine's cables writhed, and its whole front opened up, plates irising away to reveal a cockpit, a nest of connectors. As one, they sensed her presence and unfurled, straight towards her: a tropism to human flesh.  

"I'm working with UNIT!" she shouted. "They know I'm here!"  

Addison looked up; his eyes glinted purple, and the Tractators halted the machine. The wires, frustrated, twisted and grasped.

"Do they indeed," said Addison. He touched a control on the lectern, and a holographic projection—text pages, flipping and scrolling too fast for Sarah to read—flared up, startlingly bright. The Tractators in its sightline flinched, and the poor creature directly behind it curled up like a woodlouse and rolled out of the circle. That was interesting.  

The projection faded. "You may not be bluffing, Miss Smith." Addison touched another control; the lift platform lit up. "Though, really, if you are, this diversion will not make me think more kindly of you."    
He glanced around the circle at the assembled Tractators. "The show's postponed, fellows. Back to work." They scurried off, back to the machines and into the shadows. The Tractator holding her stayed put, faceted eyes blank, the gravity field pulsing undiminished from his antennae.  

Addison rested his palm flat on the control surface and bowed his head. The tendrils pulled out, a few at a time, far more slowly than they had gone in. Sweat broke out on his bare forehead, and he breathed through his teeth until at last his neck was bare. He pulled his hand away; the point of his tie disengaged from the control lectern, and from both ends, the fabric rewove.  

He unfolded a white handkerchief and wiped droplets of blood from the back of his neck. Not heat rash—scars. "How long have you been at this," said Sarah. "Plugging yourself into that machine every day?"

"Oh, not every day," he said. "The Tractators are quite autonomous, once they have their orders. They like having orders, Miss Smith. It's by far their best quality." Without answering her question, he mounted the lift platform and rose back up the chute. And Sarah was left alone, with a single Tractator guard.  

"You can't understand me at all with him gone, can you?" The Tractator stared. "No, I didn't think so. Right. Plan B." Her sonic screwdriver was in her jacket, in a zip pocket—thankfully, for she still had it. But lifting her hand was like swimming against a strong current; and even pulling the zip down was almost as difficult—the field pressed at her from all sides. But, there, that was enough to work with. She struggled to extend her hand again, wishing that she'd chosen a larger casing for the screwdriver than a lipstick tube.  

She took the deepest breath she could, reached, and caught hold of it. This was fast enough motion to catch the Tractator's attention; it waggled one antenna at her quizzically, and came a step closer.    
"Oh, you're watching, are you? Good." Sarah twisted the dial, finding the right settings range by touch and count. It was getting harder to move. "You want to see what I've got? Look closely."  

Pulling her hand four inches out of her pocket was almost impossible; she could feel the strain in every muscle of her arm and shoulder and even all along her side. For one terrible moment, she thought she would not have the strength to flip the switch. Nothing could move; she'd break her hand trying it, she'd lost, lost—

There. Brilliant light flared from the little tube; the Tractator warbled in pain and the field collapsed. Sarah fell; the dazzled creature staggered right into her and never noticed.    
Sarah curled up around her knees, like a woodlouse herself, while the mad Tractator wandered in circles. At last, it got its bearings enough to see the dark perimeter of the cavern, and stumbled away to the shadow.  

Sarah got to her feet. The other Tractators had got out of the blind one's way quickly enough, but they took no notice at all of her. Of course, she thought; none of these was ordered to guard me. "Bit of an oversight there, Mr. Addison."

The control lectern was blank and dead; whatever Addison had pressed to call down the lift wasn't hard-wired. Dodging Tractators, Sarah inspected the base of the lift shaft itself, with hands and her torch.

"Manual control. There must be a manual control somewhere."  

There was-- five feet up the shaft itself, and oh her back was not going to be happy in the morning. There weren't a lot of buttons, and none of them was labeled. "Well then. Here goes." She pressed them until she heard a hum of power; from the top of the shaft, purple glinted. That would be the recall button.  

She would have to hope Addison didn't come back and find the lift missing. It descended as slowly as any industrial lift—no, slower, she decided; far, far too slowly—and when it came, she was absurdly disappointed not to find an accelerator button hidden on the platform. She'd be caught; surely it couldn't take Addison this long to get a background check, not with the organization Norman and Carbry seemed to have…

But it did, or else her background was simply too complicated for a quick précis; the lift pulled up into an empty closet off an empty and windowless office. She listened for footsteps, but there was only the hum of machinery above. She cracked the door—an empty corridor, in what, from the damp walls and architectural hodge-podge, was clearly a sub-basement of the Despex mill.  

The corridor was deserted. She tried doors all down the hall as she passed, but didn't stay to unlock them; all she needed was the exit, and the stairwell door was clearly marked. And— her luck held out— unlocked. She closed it gently behind her, and heard as if in reply the clang of an opening door, several floors up.  

Out in the corridor were only locked doors, but underneath the last flight of stairs was a space just tall enough to crouch in, and hidden unless anyone looked specifically. She crouched and hid. Footsteps rang above, and an unfamiliar voice: "She hasn't been a known agent in thirty years."  

"I'm not taking that chance," said Addison. The footsteps turned a corner. "We'll let her call UNIT, tell them there's nothing to see, and then we send her to London and let the head office worry about her."  
Well. Bugger. That would have been a much better plan— backup, and a look inside Norman's HQ. But having escaped once, she could hardly count on Addison to be so trusting if she were caught now; she'd be lucky to make it to London with the wherewithal to investigate anything.  

No, best to get out, and fast. She huddled under the stairs, breathing slowly and shallowly, making no sound. The footsteps came closer and closer— not just the two sets, but at least five men, maybe six; they thundered over her head, the concrete ringing, and the stairwell door swung open and, at last, clacked shut. They were gone.

Though not for long; halfway to the first flight, she realized she'd forgotten to send the lift back down. Bugger bugger bugger bugger bugger. She tried the first landing door: open, wide open, a cellar. It was all brick and plumbing, older architecture than the sub-basement with— high up in a corner— windows. Brilliant— if this was the level she'd seen from outside, there'd be exit doors.  

An alarm rang, head-splitting under all the bare brick. And quite distinct, even among the echoes— she followed the sound. There: an exposed bell, above a grimily-placarded fire door.  The alarm was already on. She shouldered open the door; it swung outward into a brick-lined stairwell with open sky above, and a shoulder of rising gray moor— she'd come out on the village side; the whole compound would be between her and the mine adit. She leapt the last stairs, ready to run for all she was worth and never mind what would hurt in the morning— The alarm bells suddenly rang louder, from half a dozen open doors. She wheeled; workers were streaming out from the factory floor. Every head was capped in a mass of loose tendrils, converging at the front into the bill of a Despex baseball cap. 


	10. Chapter 10

Tractators. All the way downstairs, the Doctor kept screaming that word. The name meant nothing to Jack, or nothing that he could recall over the refrain of _the Master, the Master, she's the Master. _But it affected the Trion guards the way the Master's name had struck Jack, made them flinch and grimace and shout at him to shut up, shut up, shut up. They prodded the Doctor with their blaster barrels, and one of them struck him with the butt, hard on the elbow—Jack strained against his captor's grip, saw Martha do the same—but he kept on shouting, down the corridor, through the grated window in their cell door, until the blast doors at the end of the corridor slammed shut.

The Doctor pressed his face to their window, craned his whole body to watch the doors, while the last echoes of the word resounded from the bare walls. But they stayed shut, and after a few breaths the Doctor sagged, as sudden and as sad as ice cream falling off the stick; he slumped against the wall and down to the floor. His hands hung loose in their cuffs.  
"Doctor." Martha hadn't stopped testing her manacles. "Doctor, you knew, didn't you?"

"I suspected."

"But how?" said Jack. "He didn't regenerate—he didn't even start. He should be dead." The Doctor didn't even wince; oh, this was bad.

"Could he have had another fob watch—made a copy of himself somehow?"

The Doctor considered this. "Something like it, maybe. He had all the equipment in my TARDIS and a year to work it out…" He shrugged one shoulder. "But why the Trions—wait, no, that's obvious, never mind. _How_ the Trions—how'd he make contact with their agents in the first place? Shouldn't Lucy have been in jail?"  

"Broke out of psychiatric custody," said Jack. "We had a job hushing it up."

At least that got a reaction; Martha caught the brunt of the Doctor's glare. "Blame Jack, not me! I was still taking my exams." A line appeared between Martha's eyebrows. "Wait a bit, though. I've read the Master's UNIT files. They never could keep him locked up for long—you remember, Doctor." She loomed over him until he looked up. "Could Lucy have learned, or just… acquired… some of the Master's hypnotic powers? Even before... before she went to prison?"   

"Not learned," said the Doctor. "Not like that."  

"Then…?"  

He shrugged again. "Could be. It shouldn't be possible, but after seventeen bodies…" He frowned. "…Eighteen. At least. I don't know what he can do anymore. Except survive."  

"Survive," repeated Martha. "He's got amazing timing."

Jack flexed his hands against his own restraints, remembering how Lucy had let go the gun, how her hands had been deadweight, motionless. "It wasn't even her idea to shoot him, was it?" The Doctor didn't even shrug.

Martha sat down against the Doctor's wall, close enough to touch if she reached out, but with her bound hands wrapped around her knees. "So, Tractators. Are they what killed that woman on the moon?"  

"Yeah." The Doctor sat up a little straighter, glad for the change of subject. "The vivisection was just to get at the motor nerves—it's a brute-force neural interface. She was—they'd have used her in one of their digging machines."  

"Machines?" said Jack. "They're intelligent?"  

"Some of them. Most of the swarm are non-sapient—like a nest of termites; you put one in isolation, and it's harmless and stupid."  

"So it's a hive mind?"  

"Not quite. They have a… a thinker caste. The Graves." He said it with two syllables, Latinate. "And they're smart, and ruthless. And brilliant engineers: they hollow out gravitic arrays, under the surface of asteroids or moons or whole planets, and steer them around the galaxy like an infection."

"Voice of experience?" said Martha.

"Well, more inference than direct experience. I only met them the once. Long time ago—well, long time from now, really. Turlough—" He cleared his throat, started over half an octave lower. "The Trions fought off a Tractator infestation, right here, millennia ago. They still have a, a race memory of it. I don't know if just the name's enough to trigger it. Worth a try."  

Martha folded her arms, as best she could with her hands bound. "Turlough met them, though. When he was with you."  

"He's the one who tried to kill you?" Jack wanted to know. Martha shot him a look for that, changing the subject again, but the Doctor actually smiled. No, smirked— a very self-satisfied little smirk; Jack's assumptions about the long-legged redhead began to assume the weight of fact. "Eh, once or twice. Never made too good a job of it, though." He looked up at the cell door, and his face fell.  

Jack sat down on the Doctor's other side. "Do you think he knew?" he said. "About the Master?"

"Nah. No. No, no; not Turlough." Jack wasn't reassured.

"What about you?" said Martha. "Do you think he believed you?"  

The Doctor stared at the tiny grate in the door for so long Jack thought the silence was his answer. But, "Yes," he said at last; and for all that he sounded certain, he didn't sound happy.   

Martha—brave Martha—was the one who finally brought up the elephant in the room.

"Doctor. If the Master's consciousness is in Lucy's body, how is she still—functional?" _Sane _clearly being the wrong word. "Isn't it a metacrisis?"

"No."

"Just—no?"

"It's different." They both stared—she at his hair, he at the wall— until he deigned to explain, though he didn't meet her eyes. "Lucy Saxon is dead. All that's left of her is—echoes. Muscle memory; habits that never reached her consciousness. Maybe less than that. It's a hijacking. Anything you think you see of her is just some aspect of his own personality coming to the surface, just like in a regeneration. The Master's wearing a dead woman's body."  

After that, they sat in silence. Jack tried the doors, examined the security camera, and decided they weren't getting the door open on their own; but the Doctor didn't even seem inclined to try. Content to wait for Turlough, he supposed, since no one else here was likely to spring them. Though the Master would be down eventually to gloat. Jack tested the short chain on his cuffs and wondered if Lucy's neck was thin enough for it to make a garrote.            

                       
.

  
When Turlough came, it was with the guard. The Doctor was on his feet at the first groan of the corridor doors, craning his whole body toward the drawling voice: "I need to see the prisoners."

Another voice grunted assent, and footsteps approached—  brisk, at odds with the languid diction.. Turlough peered through the grate. Jack could see nothing of his face but a blur of pale skin, but his expression made the Doctor go very still. "Stand away from the door." The Doctor took a single step back; Jack and Martha took his four and eight. "Your keys." There was a rattle and a clunk. "I'll call for you when I'm ready."

The guard grunted again and retreated, keys jingling. Turlough opened the door, and let it fall shut behind him with an audible click of the lock.

"Don't move," Turlough repeated, not sparing even a glance for Jack or Martha. "The camera's just behind your back. Don't turn around, and don't move away from it. Now." His mouth was a tight, narrow line.

"Who are you? _Are _you the Doctor?"

"I told you, I've regenerated! You met some of my earlier incarnations. On Gallifrey? Remember?"

Turlough just tilted his chin, filing that fact away: _Remembers Gallifrey._ "There was a war," he blurted at last. "Only no one seems to remember it but me. After I came back, for years, Trion ships kept going missing, Trion outposts fell, and the survivors would come back raving about Daleks.  

"And then it stopped. The dead were still dead—most of them—but no one knew why anymore; all the records just list column after column of unexplained losses."  

Jack's head was full of that sort of memory, erased and overwritten, full of holes, but the War had given civilians everywhere a taste of it.

"Deaths unaccountable," murmured the Doctor.

Turlough blinked, and his mouth softened a little. "Yes. And no one talked any more about Daleks—even now, they all talk about them like they're something new."

"They are, to them," said the Doctor.

And then the tense caught up with all of them. The Doctor paled.

"Are?" demanded Jack. "Since the Earth was restored?"

Turlough barely met his eye, watching the Doctor as he answered. "Not many. Scouts—small ships, and far from home; they don't engage. But the Cyrrhenians have lost ships, through the Caphla cloud."

Jack's hands were cold. He reached out blindly and drew Martha into the crook of his arm, touched the Doctor's trembling sleeve. "They were destroyed," said the Doctor.

Turlough watched him swallow, impassive. "They've come back."

"For the third time!" Jack shouldered between his friends and seized the Trion's lapels. "If this is some kind of sick test, some joke on him, it just stopped being funny." He should have known they'd come back; should have known, should have guessed, shouldn't have had to hear it from this smug functionary.

Who finally met his eyes, face falling, stricken, and then looked past him to the Doctor.  

"I was the only one who knew," he said, pleading. "It was as if they'd been erased from history."  

"They were," said the Doctor. "Almost."

"Then why can I still _remember?_" he pleaded. It was the first genuine emotion Jack had heard from the man; and the contrast with his calculation in the throne room was clear and striking. Jack loosened his hold.

"You met them before the war. The TARDIS protected your memories."  

"And the Time Lords?" said Turlough. "Kasterborous is a black hole. I've listened for years for word of survivors."

"There were two," the Doctor said, very quietly. "That's all. But we weren't expunged from Time." He turned up his palms, twisting the chain tight around his wrists. "We won."  

Turlough twisted out of Jack's loose grip and undid the Doctor's jacket buttons with three quick wrenches of his hands. Jack, too late, grasped a handful of air. But Turlough only pressed one palm, and then the other, against the Doctor's shirt. Feeling his heartbeats, thought Jack. His pale face slowly went even whiter.

He slumped all at once, shoulders drooping, breath rushing out. The Doctor swayed and braced on his heels, taking his weight.  

"Doctor." Turlough smiled without any calculation; it made him look very young. "Doctor."

 

~*~

   
Turlough had more tests at the ready, words, names, secrets of a long-dead body. But he no longer doubted: that was the Doctor looking out of this man's eyes; and those were the Doctor's hearts, beating asynchronous and fast below his cool skin. The Doctor, here, alive, his presence as real as his death had always been abstract and unbelievable.

"Turlough." His whole face lit up, in relief and joy, and a pride that Turlough almost flinched from. This was the Doctor; and Despina was the Master; and Turlough was going to have to explain about the last year and a half.

He dropped his hands, but the Doctor caught one, clasped it in a rattle of chains; Turlough felt eighteen again, taking a stranger's hand with a head full of secrets and enemies.   

Well. That Doctor had forgiven him. And it wasn't as if he didn't have a good excuse for everything, mostly. "Doctor, I swear I didn't know about the Master," he said. "Please believe that."

"It's all right, Turlough. You weren't to know." There was that hint of the old Doctor, his Doctor, in the words and in the slouch of his shoulders. "He's good at that, at winning trust."

"Earning it," said Turlough. "I've never had many illusions about her methods, but she's always been good to me." He stifled a snort of laughter. "Her joke on you."  

The blue-eyed man cleared his throat. "Could we have the reunion somewhere more comfortable? Maybe laugh about it over dinner, a few glasses of wine?" He held up his manacled hands.

"I can get you out of here in chains easier than free," he said. "I'm sorry, Captain Harkness."

"Jack," he enunciated, though he made the courtesy sound like a challenge— a trick he'd thought only Tegan could manage. "So let's go."

"No." The Doctor stared narrowly at a point over his shoulder, another almost-familiar expression.

"No?" This from the human doctor, Jones— or Martha, more likely. "What do you mean, no?"  

"We're not leaving," he said. "I'm not leaving the Master in control of the Trion League." He turned to Turlough. "How do we get to him?"  

There was no doubt in his eyes, no question but that Turlough would be with him on this. Hard to tell if it was trust or arrogance; and hard to know if he should feel flattered or slighted; but the confidence, at least, was contagious, and a tightness eased in Turlough's chest.  

"That depends," said Turlough. "Are we killing her?"

"Straight to the point," said Jack, somewhat more warmly.  

The Doctor looked sick at the thought, but he didn't rule it out. "What would it take," he said instead, "to force him out? Into prison, or exile?"

"Or abduct him?" Martha's voice had a bitter edge. "Keep him?"

This was clearly an old argument. Turlough, reading back between the lines of the news reports, thought he could discern traces of the Doctor's involvement in Saxon's decline, but the details were a blank. "You're right about the Tractators, Doctor," he said. "She confirmed those, by the way. I'd never have followed her if I'd known. And no Trion would, if they knew. But you'd have to have more of the Tractators than just the name.  You'd need proof. Something that would make people remember, even over the newsvid."

"Well, that shouldn't be too hard," said the Doctor. "Just the name made those guards twitch; and just the sight of the tunnels brought out your race memory, back on Frontios."  

"I'm afraid my own reaction to the excavations may not have been typical, Doctor. I'd been in tunnels like that before, and the memories were... bad."  

"They must have been," said the Doctor, cocking his head curiously but not asking.

"We used Tractator asteroids in the war," said Turlough, shortly. "I think my own— race memory, you called it?—" The Doctor nodded. "—may have been mingled with some shellshock."  

"Used for what?" asked Martha. "Hideouts? Rebel forces, striking from a hidden base?"

"People still quote those?" said Turlough; and then, because it was best to say it while the Doctor was smiling, "That's Despina's other line of defense, Doctor."  

"What, surveillance satellites?" he guessed. "Space-going bunker? Arms cache?"  

Turlough took a deep breath. "Orbital rail-gun platforms."  

The Doctor stopped smiling. "That... that's a complication. You know he won't hesitate to use them."

"I know," said Turlough. "But there is a way to get round them. The maintenance system has a hardwired lockout code— I'm quite sure Despina doesn't know the password."  

"Well, that's a start," mused the Doctor. "If we could— wait a bit. How do you know it?"  

Turlough held the Doctor's gaze, feeling like a schoolboy again. "I built them."  

"What?"  

"Well, from a design we used in the war to—"

"What?" Turlough swallowed and shut up. "You built the Master an orbital rail gun network? Before he was elected?"

"I didn't know she was—"

"But you couldn't tell he was dangerous? Maybe from, oh, here's a thought, from the privately-held rail gun network?"  

"Of course I knew she was dangerous," hissed Turlough. "I assure you, the previous administration was no better; at least she was on my side. Or seemed to be. And there are Daleks, out beyond Cyrrhenia." His Doctor had never been so hard to look at; had never been so angry with him, Turlough thought, even over the Black Guardian. "Doctor," he pleaded. "I know my hands aren't clean. I want to make this better."  

The Doctor let out a sigh, and his face softened. "Right," he said. It wasn't quite forgiveness, not yet, but it was a reprieve. "We'll need to secure the guns, then, before we take proof of the Tractators public. Will the Master have left any evidence on this planet?"

Turlough considered. "Among her private papers, maybe. She keeps fairly thorough technical records, and she'd need specs of the excavation machines, if nothing else. And there's a fiber she may be developing into a neural interface mechanism; I have some worries about that."  

"Despex, yes, we know," said Jack. "But Doctor, what about Earth? We can't let them be overrun by Tractators while we take down the Master."  

Turlough had barely thought about Earth. He refused to feel guilty for this.  

"We'll need Trion transport to get back to the TARDIS," said the Doctor. "Those orbital guns could be turned against outbound traffic— could they?" Turlough nodded. "Right, then. Rail guns first." He turned to Turlough. "Can you contact them from here?"

"Yes; from my terminal, or Despina's."  

"If we can get to hers, we can search the Master's files." The Doctor didn't seem to notice the shift in pronouns. "Can you get us in?"  

Well. He'd asked for a chance to put things right. "Us, no. You'd be far too conspicuous. But I can get myself in, copy any useful files and bring them away."

The Doctor wasn't pleased, and his friends positively bristled at the suggestion. "So we knock out a couple of guards, steal some uniforms," said Jack. "Everyone looks the same in a jumpsuit with epaulettes."

Martha looked from the Doctor's hair to Jack's matinee-idol chin and raised her eyebrows silently. "All right," Jack conceded, "maybe not _exactly_ the same."

"I don't like it either," said Martha. "If he has to be the one to get those files, couldn't we rendezvous with him later, say, at the spaceport? We don't know how long it'll take the Master to get creative, having us prisoner."

The Doctor pursed his lips. "No. Turlough's right." He met Turlough's eyes; his own were nothing like what Turlough remembered. "We'll wait."

Well. He had wanted to put things right. "I won't let you down."


	11. Chapter 11

One by one, the mill workers caught sight of her. Sarah Jane backed away, wondering whether turning and running would just draw them on faster.  

They stumbled at first, but the interface only seemed to need a moment to warm up; they came faster and faster, and finally a curly-haired woman at the front of the pack broke into an easy lope.  

Turning and running it was, then. Sarah fled.  

Her binoculars almost knocked the wind out of her, until she finally flung them off over her head. She stole a glance over her shoulder: a few of the workers were dropping back, perhaps less amenable to the Despex-mediated mind-control, but others were gaining on her. And more shambled out of the factory doors; and guards with guns, as well.  

And most of them were young, and seemed to have excellent knees.

Ahead of her, the stony ground began to glow, a vague purple haze, as though seen through sand or pumice. Sarah Jane swerved wildly to avoid it, in the process losing most of her lead on the pack of Despex zombies. One of them lost his footing in the suddenly fluid ground and fell to the earth— and through it. Sarah looked ahead and ran on, but she heard his cries, up until they were suddenly stifled.  

Right, so. Mob of mindless textile workers behind her, sinkholes full of unspeakable horror underneath, a good mile of moorland at least between her and the village. Sarah felt rather like a Gothic heroine, and nearly as close to collapse.  

She risked another backward glance. The woman with the blond curls was only yards behind, and gaining fast. Sarah sprinted. Everything hurt. Her foot came down, and slid over loose sand, and sank in— and in, and in.

It was another gravitic beam, it had to be, pulling at her from under the ground. She dug her fingers into cold earth and moss and heather and heaved herself out, but nothing was solid; her next step slipped even deeper into shifting earth. She got her hand on the sonic screwdriver, but before she could aim it, the workers were on her. The blonde woman leapt, caught her, pinned her down.

They grappled, the woman trying to roll her toward the shifting glow at the beam's center. Sarah kicked, bit, used everything but her right hand, knowing that if she dropped the screwdriver, she was lost. She heard and dimly saw one man, then another, disappear into the crumbling soil, and struggled harder, but the woman had her right hand pinned to the ground. She felt the earth turn to dust between her fingers.  

And then the woman screamed in her ear; in her moment of distraction Sarah freed her left hand, and ripped off the woman's Despex cap. Tendrils waved, gouging runnels in Sarah's hand. She tossed the cap away, into the churning earth, and got a leg between them and wriggled free, up onto still-solid ground.  

The woman looked up at her, disoriented and shocky and scared. Her legs were sunk to the knee in the earth, and still sinking. "Cover your eyes," Sarah called, and flashed the light beam.

It was the same setting as before, but the Tractator generating the beam was protected, screened by the earth; the woman still fell, by fits and starts. "Help me!" she cried.  

"Take my hand!" Sarah leaned as far out as she dared, grasped the woman's hand and held on. Her own was slippery with blood; the woman began to slip. Behind, the next wave of zombies was closing in.    
One-handed, she clicked the lipstick base fourteen settings over. If light didn't work, then she'd fight gravity with gravity.  

It was not a strong repulsor beam, not as such things go, but it interfered beautifully with the Tractator beam. The purple glow flickered, and for just a moment, the earth was solid again. "Come on, heave!" shouted Sarah. The woman bent her knees, tensed, heaved, and leapt free of the imprisoning soil, almost bowling Sarah over as she came down.  

The Tractator was still there; the earth trembled. "Come on," said Sarah, "run!"  

They ran. More sinkholes opened; she caught the woman's arm and held her out of one, and the woman hauled her bodily out of another. Behind them, the Tractators had claimed still more victims. But once they neared the village, the gravitic attacks ceased; perhaps the Tractators had not yet tunnelled so far from the mine.

But the clear passage helped the runners still in pursuit, as much as it helped them; by the time the two women reached the road, Sarah winded and almost weeping with exhaustion, six or seven mill workers and guards were right behind.

"I know a place," the woman hissed. "This way!" Sarah let her lead them down an alley between two shops and through a back door; she bolted it behind them and turned on a single one of the bare industrial bulbs. They were in a stockroom, of a hardware shop from the look of it.  

Sarah collapsed onto a flat of paint cans, panting, trying to breathe deep enough not to get a stitch and failing utterly. "Thank you," she gasped.

"Shhhh," hissed the woman, leaning against the door to listen. From the alley, Sarah heard running feet. A door rattled across the street; and then their own door shook in its frame.

Silence, for a moment; and then the footsteps pounded off down the alley.

The woman slumped against the door and let out a breath. "That was too close," she sighed.  "I'm Laura Wheare, by the way."

"Sarah Jane Smith," said Sarah.  

"What _happened_ back there?" She shook her head in disbelief. "All of us, chasing after you for no good reason?" She straightened her back. "_Is_ there a good reason?"  

"For keeping me prisoner and trying to kill me?" It came out half giggles; she was still light-headed from the run. She took in a deep breath and tried again. "The reason is those caps you all wear, Ms. Wheare," she said.  

"Laura. What do you mean, the caps?"  

"Laura. This is going to be hard to believe, but those caps were designed to control you— your minds, your actions. I don't know if they're independently programmed, or externally controlled, but they were directing your actions, through tiny threads sunk right into your skull."  

"Really," said Laura, deadpan; and, more thoughtfully, "You know, that would explain a few things."  

"This has happened before?"

Laura ran her hands through her loose curls. They came away blood-smeared. A single Despex thread snarled around her fingers; she untwined it and stretched it out. "Yeah. Back in the autumn, we had a big order to fill— Christmas, you know. Lots of overtime; shifts round the clock. Well, I was happy for the money at first— I paid off the car loan that month. But some of those nights..." She shook her head, her face shuttering.

"What were they like?"  

Laura shrugged "Like it was suddenly morning and you couldn't remember working any of the night. I didn't think that much of it— I mean, shift work, it's not all that memorable, and the night shift especially just puts you out of it. Except that our output those nights was just impossible."  

"Too much? Too good?"

"Both. We've never done so much in an ordinary day shift. It was as if nothing at all went wrong, not one single cock-up anywhere, all night. And, well, what are the odds?" She looked down at her hands. "And then in the morning— a couple of mornings— I noticed blood on my collar." She stared at the Despex thread in disgust. "I feel like those mornings right now; like an hour of my life is just gone and I didn't notice."    
"You didn't," said Sarah. "You weren't living it. Someone else was using you, using that scrap of Despex to somehow connect to your brain and control your actions."  

Laura flung the thread away in disgust. "So what now? My mates are still out there, hunting for you."  

"We find a telephone," said Sarah, "and call some friends of mine. And then—" she looked around at the contents of the stockroom. Clothesline, gaffer tape, tarpaulins— everything a girl could want. "Then, I think we go on a little scavenger hunt." 

 

~*~

 

Despina's office was empty. Her absence was unlucky in a way; she would almost certainly be on her way to see the prisoners. Turlough locked the door behind him, and brought up a feed from the security camera: for the moment, the corridor was empty; the Doctor paced the cell, stepping over the two humans' outstretched legs.

He called for Malkon first; he'd need him for this, need an ally. It distressed him, how few allies he had, outside of Despina's influence. And speaking of allies: "That aide of yours? Do you trust her?"

"Completely." Not even a pause.

"Bring her, if she's still around." Malkon picked his staff from the applicants no one else at their level would employ: Sarns, trade-school graduates, young women. Through, as far as Turlough could tell, uncalculated tender-heartedness, he'd amassed a department of hirelings devoted personally, and utterly, to himself, not to his office; and if Malkon wouldn't exploit that, Turlough certainly would.

The security feed still showed nothing. Turlough called up the orbital platform baselines on Despina's terminal; he'd need passwords he didn't have to access the full controls, but he'd left himself a back door—

—and she'd found it.

The screen flickered; there she was, black coat and black shadow gliding down the corridor. Six floors away; at least he had time to breathe.

But six miles of breathing space wouldn't help him with the orbitals. She'd found his loophole; his codes were locked out. Turlough interrogated the dumb onboards. She couldn't possibly have overwritten the lockdown codes, he'd made _certain_ of that—  

And she hadn't. She'd resorted to brute force and blocked any ground input to the lockdown system. It would take a full-scale powerdown sequence to shut it off, through the main control gate. Or through the onboard interface, for all the good that did them.

On the screen, Despina leaned against the cell door, lips framed in the bars for a split second, before the Doctor blocked the camera's eye. His pinstriped back quivered.

She'd not let on that she suspected anything. Perhaps she didn't—she might well expect him to leave a back door in the code out of simple, useful paranoia, and block it from the same impulse, without thinking it worth mention or even worry.

Or she might have had him under close observation for months. The door chimed as he thought it—he flinched hard, but it was only Malkon and his aide. He buzzed them in. "Shut the door."

"Vislor, what's the matter? Is this about the prisoners?"

Turlough plugged in a data stub and began calling up the Terra directories, the ones he did still know the passwords to. "Yes. Watch that screen and tell me if she leaves the cell. Or if anything untoward happens." Plans of the Terran factories; sketches of machinery; asteroid surveys from when they planned the orbitals—but copying was quick; he took it all. "Remember what I told you about the Tractators?"

"Yes. Is shouting untoward?"

"Not nearly. Despina is breeding Tractators on Terra and its moon. A private army of them, and a neural interface for human or Trion controllers—that fabric."

Facsimiles of geological surveys. Work orders for the moonbase equipment. Still no smoking gun. "Does she plan to deploy the creatures?"

"She's not keeping them for lapdogs, Malkon!" His hand trembled over the data stub, waiting for the copy to verify. "If I found you proof, would you take it to the Ministerium floor?"

The girl's breath caught, lifting her chin and shoulders; Malkon said merely "Of course."

"Could you carry a vote, if it came to that?"

"Just the name of these creatures strikes the heart with fear. Fearful men will not break with her easily."

"If you had more than the name? A picture—a live creature, even?"

"It would help, certainly."

"Good enough. You—what's your name?"

"Daine, sir; Attris Daine."

"Daine, copy this stub, and keep a copy." He gave her his chair, stealing a glance at the surveillance feed: the hall camera showed Despina, a column of black, shoulders slanting and craning to follow the Doctor's every move.

Now that he knew, he wondered how could have missed it.

Despina's file drawers were locked, of course, and with keys, not keypads. She kept an immaculate office; it would be too much to hope for a convenient pile of papers—

—or a gray bin, looking like the stack in the guardroom, heaped with keys and change and—oh, lucky, lucky day—all the contents of the prisoners' pockets.

He took the keys and the sonic screwdriver, and abstracted IDs for UNIT and an outfit called Torchwood from their respective wallets. A missing phone would be too obvious; he pocketed the debit cards and cash instead, and left the rest.

The cabinets yielded to the eighth or ninth screwdriver setting he tried, springing open all at once. Malkon pulled out a drawer next to him and joined the search. "What can you use, besides photographs?"

"Look for mining or excavating equipment—any unfamiliar machinery. Geological or astronomical surveys. Gravitics charts," he added, as though his tribal-educated brother would recognize one—though he'd seen Turlough's books, hadn't he?

It was Daine who found pay dirt. "Sir?" She offered the dossier in a shaking hand, open to a sheaf of glossy, clinical images: an immature Tractator in a sterile white room, every day of its maturation documented. Turlough flipped pages: grainy records from a unmanned probe in the asteroids, showing the long-dormant eggs heaped in their slick-walled tunnels. A row of labeled eggs under incubator lights. Tractators chewing ore into ingots, extruding wire through their palps. A naked human on a laboratory slab, a whole Tractator brood swarming over him, flaying his arms and neck with their bare mouth parts, prodding copper rods and their own chitinous spines into his flesh—

He tore his eyes away when the images began to swim, slumped back against the cabinets, bloodless, tasting bile. He shut the folder without looking down.

"I need to go to Earth. And so I need to shut those satellites down before she shoots me out of the sky." He pressed the dossier into Malkon's hands. "Go home. Stow these someplace safe and go home, and be conspicuously not here. You'll need to walk into the Ministerium smelling of attar, if I slip up."

"I won't let her bring those creatures here, I promise."

"And thank you for not saying _I told you so._"

Malkon tilted his head, a shrug of the chin. "You never said_ politics makes strange bedfellows_ when we built the ticket."

"Well." Turlough turned away and fiddled with the screwdriver until he found the reverse setting that relocked the cabinets. "So, Daine." He pocketed the data stub and tossed her the duplicate. "If you survive this, you could end up with my job. Think you can do it?"

"Your job, sir? Or surviving?"

"I'd concentrate on the latter, first." Turlough scrambled the ground input settings to the orbital units—nothing she couldn't undo, but at least it would take time to reverse, and erased what he could from the activity logs.

Scrambling the security camera feed wouldn't be a bad idea, either. He glanced up at the screen: Despina was draped against the door now, face to the grill—and a corridor away, Mattias Carbry was stomping toward the guardroom.

Damn. He'd delay them all night if he got to the prisoners. Turlough switched the intercom to all-call. "Paging Agency Head Carbry. Paging Mr. Carbry; Carbry, please respond from your nearest comm unit."

On the screen, Despina straightened, frowning; Carbry stopped, bit off a curse, and opened his phone. "Carbry; what is it?"

"The president would like to see you, sir. In her office. Immediately."

He shot a glare at the camera eye. "Can't it wait?"

"I'm afraid not; it's quite important. I'll tell her you're on your way." He keyed in Despina's number as he spoke. "Ma'am, it's Carbry."

She paced one step away from the cell door, not far enough to deter a devoted listener. "Why were you paging him?"

"He was on his way down to the cells, in a horrific temper; I didn't think you'd want him bursting in your interrogation in such a state. I've sent him up to your office to cool down; I think you might want to have a few words with him about his onworld duties."

He watched her assume presidential gravitas like a coat, shaking her shoulders and straightening her spine. "No doubt. I think our guests might profit from considering my offer for a while, alone. I'll be up straightaway."

"I'll leave him in your office when he arrives. I still need to vet some of Carbry's onworld staff, and I don't think it would improve his temper for him to see me with the dossiers. Turlough out."

On the screen, Despina turned one last glance to the cell door, and then followed Carbry's steps, at a measured pace, a corridor behind and a floor below.

The clock was running. "Malkon—hurry."

His brother gave him a curt nod—the one gesture of their father's Turlough ever saw in him—and turned. "Miss Daine?"

"No, Daine, you stay. Make sure Carbry stays here. If you can delay them both without making it obvious—" he hustled them all out the door, made sure it locked—"do it."

"You can count on me, sir." They broke in three directions, bodies in a gravitics exercise, Malkon at a fast walk toward the plaza doors, the girl turning in place before the President's office, and Turlough hurtling down the service stairwell at a run, faster and faster the farther he spiraled down.


	12. Chapter 12

The Despex workers, it turned out, would attack anyone not wearing a controlling cap or tie. Which made subduing them rather easier; Sarah had no difficulty convincing the police of their danger-- or indeed the whole of the local citizenry, once their neighbors began shambling into town dragging anyone they could catch out onto the moor, where new sinkholes were opening like bubbles in a pancake.

Convincing them not to scour the moor for the missing, or to approach the mine, was much harder. "Give me a list," Sarah finally told the police sergeant, "of the first-responders and the volunteers, so I can let UNIT know how many bodies to look for when they arrive." And she stalked back to the pub—a good, defensible location, with sightlines all up and down the high street—to make a few phone calls.

Colonel Mace at UNIT HQ promised to send a search-and-rescue team, and enough men to surround the plant, immediately. "I'll recommend to Geneva that Despex's other facilities be investigated, but the level of response will of course depend on what my men find at your site, Ms. Smith."

"Of course." Sarah's knee throbbed; she stretched it out, wincing.

"It's not that I doubt your judgment, Ms. Smith. It's simply a matter of proof."

"I'm not offended, Colonel." Nor surprised, she didn't add, but it was probably understood. "Is there any word from Martha Jones yet?"

"None; her transponder's been off the grid since 10:40."

She'd have to ask Luke about the TARDIS. "Then I'd send another medic with her team, if I were you; we've got over a hundred people affected by this neural-interface mechanism."

"I'll find someone," said Mace, and signed off.

Sarah sighed. At the next table, a young police constable, bandaged ankle propped on a chair and mobile pressed to his ear, silently offered her one of his ice packs. She shook her head. "I think a hot water bottle would do me more good," she mouthed.

"Oh, go ahead and talk," he said aloud. "It's just hold music. Consumer protection hotline. They don't seem to know what to do with this."

"No. No, I don't suppose they would."

At Torchwood, there was still no sign of Jack, either; Mickey said he'd drive up by morning.

Luke reported that the TARDIS was still parked in the garden.

Damn. That made it much less likely that Doctor had gone away with Martha and Jack under his own steam; at best, it meant they were dependent on the Trions, or whoever was running the transmat system, for a ride home. "Luke, can you still stay at Clyde's until I get back?"

"Yes. His mother likes having me to stay. She seems to think I don't eat enough." Sarah could hear a snort in the background. "Clyde says if I drink enough coffee, it might stunt my growth."

"Well, if it keeps you up all night, on your head be it; you're still going to school in the morning. But, listen, before you take off for Clyde's, have Mr. Smith scan for transmat signatures in Earth orbit; or for any unexplained near-Earth traffic. Lunar traffic, too. Have him text you if he finds anything; I've lost my phone, but I'll call to check in, and you can call Mickey once he gets here."

She stretched to hang the phone back in its wall cradle, tilting her chair back on two legs.

"Here, let me." Laura Wheare appeared, red-faced, and took the phone from her. "Assistant?"

"Sort of. My son; he's fifteen. I hate leaving him alone like this."

"What," said the policeman, "does he throw drunken parties?"

"Oh, if only," sighed Sarah. "Though—I don't know that _would_ be any easier. Just a different kind of difficult."

"Sounds like he's your kind of difficult, if you can leave this—" Laura gestured vaguely—"sort of thing in his hands."

Sarah looked again at Laura's windblown hair. "Oh, dear. What sort of difficult are they being out there?"

"Not so bad now, really; they're halting the search for the night, and the police won't go down the mine or into the mill yard until morning. Or anyone else; they're blocking the roads and waiting for UNIT. And I've got a list of all the missing." Her face fell. "Nineteen people still unaccounted for. Most of them were on my shift."

"Oh, I'm sorry."

"It's all right; they've got a better chance than the townspeople; they could still just be in the mill." She dredged up a smile—pale, and weary, but genuine. "Look, we really do have it under control out there." The police constable nodded. "Get yourself a room and have a bath and a lie-down; you're going to be right back on your feet when UNIT comes, aren't you?"

"Probably," Sarah allowed. "All right, you've convinced me. But please send someone to wake me when they do arrive." She got to her feet and wished she hadn't. "Whatever the hour."

.

It was months from tourist season; Sarah had her pick of the pub's guest rooms. She clattered downstairs alone at six and found the Torchwood SUV illegally parked outside, with Mickey leaning on the fender and chatting up Laura. "How long have you been here?"

"Couple hours. 'S my fault we let you sleep; sounded like you could use it." He passed her a paper cup and a flask of coffee; it was fresh and quite hot, and she forgave him instantly. "I don't need a mother hen," she said anyway.

"Maybe I need to let mine out every now and then. Don't get much chance, with Ianto Jones around."

"No, I suppose you wouldn't." She drained her coffee and poured a second cup. "UNIT?"

"They're out on the moor, probing those sinkholes," offered Laura. "They've found a body—at least one. No one knows whose, yet."

"They've set up a perimeter around the mill," said Mickey. "Management is holed up inside; no one's been in or out. And they've got a mobile HQ just outside town. I'll give you a lift down; there's a doctor there asking for you."

Sarah clambered into the SUV, feeling yesterday in every inch of her legs. Mickey opened the back door and turned to Laura. "Could use some help with the equipment."

"Why not?" She smiled through the dark circles under her eyes, and took a seat next to —-

"Is that a gravitometer?" said Sarah.

"Yeah. Thought I'd take some readings, now it's light enough to go out on the moor." He revved the engine with a little more gusto than was strictly necessary.

"No word from Jack, or Martha?"

"Nothing. I got a text from your son, though. Apparently Mr. Smith found a bunch of ion trails heading outsystem from the moon—regular traffic, like—but there's no telling how old any one of them is." He dug into his pocket and pulled out a Torchwood-issue headset mobile and an external keypad with duct tape holding the battery in. "Here. Number's on the keypad. Mother hen is one thing, but secretary is not my job."

  
The mobile HQ was in two trailers this time, one of them set up as a lab—an autopsy lab; Sarah's throat closed around the smell as she pushed through the clear curtains. There was a corpse on the metal table, face down with its spine laid open to the light. She choked, tasting coffee and bile. "How awful."

"That you, old girl?"

"Harry?" And it was, gloved and masked, in civvies and a white lab coat. "You retired—I went to your party, and you swore you were going to grow begonias and learn to fish."

"Well, I did get a begonia." He tossed her a surgical mask. "It died. Put that on—precautions, you understand. Come take a look at this."

Sarah followed him to the edge of the table. It was supposed to get easier, seeing dead bodies. In nearly forty years, it hadn't got any easier for her. Some days she was thankful for that. Not today.

"Who was he?"

"Security guard at the plant. Found him in one of the sinkholes."

"The Tractators must have got him by mistake, trying to catch me. Did they—there was a body found near the Despex warehouse, with the nerves laid out like that."

"Oh, no! That was me. Post-mortem. No, this man died of suffocation, but very oddly—there was no struggle, no foreign matter in his mouth or nasal sinuses, no signs that he resisted at all. Just that odd mottling of the skin, around the hairline and the neck—you see?"

"Those are the marks where the Despex threads… plug in," said Sarah. "Addison, the manager, had the same thing."

"Yes, so they told me. At any rate, I was checking for signs of a paralyzing agent—toxins, electric shock, energy weapons discharge. And instead, I found these." He leaned over the body like Prince Charming and prodded the spinal nerves with wire-fine tweezers, and drew out—nothing, Sarah thought, until it caught the light and shimmered.

"Despex threads?"

"Take a look." He sandwiched the thread between glass slides and slid it onto a microscope stage—quite a powerful scope, from the size of it— and pulled out a lab stool for Sarah with exaggerated chivalry. Through the stereo eyepieces, the thread was a scatter of spilled beads, the monofilament that connected them invisible to light microscopy.

"He had Despex," she said, "in his brain?"

"Near enough, yes."

"Ugh."

"Indeed."

"Are they…" she rooted in her jacket pocket for the sonic lipstick. "Have you tested, whether they react to any sort of signal?"

"Just what I had—x-rays, different radio frequencies. I was hoping you'd have the goods."

"Well. The Doctor found one triggering frequency—that was in the nine hundreds; mine's not calibrated quite the same way, but I think it should be around here." She switched on; the glass slide trembled on the stage, but there was no other effect.

They went through Sarah's whole sonic range, one setting at a time; and then they tried it again, on the threads still embedded in the man's nerves. "I wonder," said Sarah, when they had still produced no effect but to animate the scraps of the guard's necktie, in their specimen bag halfway across the room. "What if they only activate in living bodies?"

She called Mickey on the headset, and he brought Laura in. "Go ahead," she said, when they'd explained. "If I have any of that stuff in my spine, I want to know about it."

"We don't know how much exposure it takes for it to build up," Sarah stressed. "You might be completely free of it. And, if there is Despex in your system, we don't actually know what activating it will do. You might fall back under Addison's control."

"Might attack you again, you mean? Better stand where I can't see you."

She'd have done that anyway, to help rule out placebo effects. "We're going to try a range of frequencies; some of them won't do anything. Tell us if you feel anything different, anything unusual."

But she didn't, not even on the settings that had made the necktie writhe. "I'm clean, then?" She ran her hands through her curls.

"Well, without exploratory surgery I can't say for sure," said Harry. "And I don't think you'd want that."

"So, we know nothing," said Sarah, when she had gone.

"More or less. It's a much more detailed nothing, though."

"Well, that's a start." Sarah looked back through the microscope despondently. The beads under the slide had shifted, kaleidoscope-like. "Harry. They've moved. They didn't move before."

He looked for himself. "Some of those settings made the glass vibrate. Might have just scrambled them that way."

"I suppose." She ran through the full range of sonic settings again, just to be sure, staring through the scope the whole while; nothing moved until she reached the zero mark again, heaved a great sigh, and jostled the table. Beads rolled between the slides; colors shifted. "The magic setting is 'clumsy,'" she announced. "And now, I'm going to go find the coffee, and drink enough to stunt my growth."

  
 ~*~

"So," said Jack. "That's your long-lost schoolboy."

"Mm." The Doctor craned his neck at the barred window, looking up and down the corridor.

"Must have looked good in the uniform. Did he wear one of those high starched collars?"

"Mm? Oh, yes, invariably. And this straw boater, with the little striped hatband and everything."

The fondness in the Doctor's voice hit Jack like a blow—that was what it took, then, to make him stop pretending he'd never so much as flirted back. Jack wondered if the Doctor ever spoke of him with that warmth, and to whom.  

"How Edwardian," muttered Martha, sounding almost as bitter as Jack felt.

"Yeah, I like a man in a uniform, but these Trions do take it a bit far."

"Very Prussian of them." She smiled, just a little; it was good to see.  "Doctor, you are sure you can trust him?"

The Doctor shushed her. "Someone's coming."

High heels, clacking down the tiled floor; it was Lucy—Despina. The Master, unbelievable as that was.

She folded her arms on the ledge of the small barred window and smiled, a wide mad smile that showed no teeth. "Doctor. Are the accommodations to your liking? I do hope you won't refuse my hospitality this time." She flicked an eyebrow at Martha, at Jack; the expression was not Lucy's.

"Throwing out the pretence, now we're alone? Eh, _Despina?_" The Doctor actually made air quotes around her name.

"Oh, surely we have no need of pretence, not between us. My dear, dear Doctor."

And that was the end of Jack's doubts.. She taunted the Doctor through the grill, with asides for him and Martha—the same stale taunts he'd heard for a year on the _Valiant,_ in almost the Master's exact diction. And the same offer to the Doctor—to support her rule as a consort, or as a pet; no other choices. Jack withdrew a few paces, less to give the Doctor the illusion of privacy than to let them all pretend the Doctor had never been tempted.  

"That the best you can do, Despina?" The Doctor stretched out the name, sounding perfectly bored; but below Lucy's sightline, his cuffs and trouser hems quivered with suppressed movement. "No new ideas? That's the problem with body-snatching—nothing to give the neurons a good shakeup. But then you'd know that, wouldn't you?"

She smiled, minutely, more with her eyebrows than her lips. "Oh, you'd be surprised at the ideas I have, Doctor."

"Try me. Go on, say something new."

"Daleks."

The Doctor stilled. "Something I don't already know."

"Then you know you failed to destroy them, again—oh, yes, the Shadow Proclamation confirm you were there, even if the affair didn't have your fingerprints all over it. How does it feel to be a failed genocide, Doctor? But, then, you would know all about that. Wouldn't you?"

Martha caught Jack's wrist and shook her head. The Doctor let a out a breath, very slowly, opening his fists again with deliberation.

"They're building a fleet, you know," continued Lucy.

"Yes, yes, Caphla cluster. I've heard."

She raised one delicate eyebrow. "Not far from where Skaro used to be. I wouldn't have expected such sentimentality over a patch of irradiated flotsam."

"Says the man wearing his wife's corpse." Her nostrils whitened, and the Doctor stood a little straighter. "Did you choose her for this, from the start?"

She stepped away from the door. "What's the matter, Doctor? Don't you like it?" A flash of hair as she spun, arms skimming her sides, and then she was back at the grill; close enough to kiss, if the Doctor had met her halfway. "I chose her for you."

The Doctor's mouth twisted. "You disgust me," he spat; but his hand pressed hard against the door, fingers scrabbling as if to reach through.

Turlough's voice interrupted, first with a page, and then a phone call. She turned away to take it, and the Doctor took an abortive step after her—only one, and then he caught himself on his outstretched arm, his grasping fingers slowly clenching.  

She looked over her shoulder at him, yellow hair framing her doll's face. "You didn't mind when she did it." And she walked away, swaying on her heels. Jack didn't dare ask who _she_ meant.


	13. Chapter 13

Turlough hadn't orchestrated a jailbreak in years, not since the last time he'd broken the Doctor out, but he hadn't lost the knack. And neither had the Doctor—in a few, silent minutes, the cameras were scrambled, the guard knocked out and locked up, and the Doctor and his friends clambering out the nearest (and at this hour, only) unmonitored exit Turlough knew—the window of the gymnasium changing room, which was always propped open a few inches to let out the steam.

The Doctor stood on Jack's knee to clamber up the rough brick of the window-well, and then reached down to hoist Martha up to ground level. "You coming?" said Jack, the first words any of them had spoken. The man didn't trust him yet, nor did Martha; but after a glance at the Doctor, they had followed Turlough's wordless lead as though long accustomed.

Turlough shook his head. "Through the building; I'll need to send for the car." A sleek government podcar came with his position, but it languished for weeks at a time in the garage. But in the last few hours before dawn, it would surely draw no remark if he spared himself the walk home.

Jack scrambled up, and the Doctor crouched on the window-well, nose almost level with his trainers. "Where do we meet you?"

"They'll bring the car round to that portico, just the other side of the terrace." He pointed in the general direction, though he could see nothing, balanced on a sink with his chin on the sill. "Get across the drive and wait in the shrubbery; I'll find a way to let you in."

"Right. You didn't liberate my psychic paper, did you?"

There'd been a wallet full of blank cards. "Pardon?"

"Never mind. Go, go on."

Turlough went, pelting through dim corridors too fast for prudence. There would be one night attendant in the garage, who would return there after leaving the car, and one guard at the carport doors. The car would cast a shadow all the way across the drive; the guard would ignore any reasonable amount of delay, luggage-stowing and tire-kicking. They'd be almost unobserved, for a moment, for long enough.

He skidded to a halt inside the last set of doors, smoothed his lapels, and checked and rechecked the latches on his briefcase, with its precious cargo of photos and files. He drew a breath and walked out into the carport lobby in no more haste than any man who wants desperately to get home. The garage man answered his page with a yawn; the guard barely looked at his badge as he stepped outside.

And found Kerl Arnam under the portico, waiting for his car.

He smiled, falsely, but that was nothing new. "Evening."

"Not anymore it's not."

"No, you're quite right." He tried to look into the hedge without looking, but the light above his head threw everything outside its circle into blackness.

Arnam shifted his weight to his umbrella. "Your driver as useless as mine?"

"I don't employ one, actually."

"Really." Arnam's brows knitted in the middle. "Not heading home tonight, then?"

The last time Arnam had descended to such clumsy speculation, Turlough had given him a stultifyingly exhaustive account of his (alas, all too innocent) day. The lesson hadn't taken, it seemed. Any other night, Turlough thought—and then the attendant brought the car up, and opened the driver's door for Turlough.

Arnam was still waiting. Turlough nodded to him, grimly. He saw a movement, he thought, in the shadows this side of the hedge. He wandered round and opened the rear door, laid his briefcase on the seat, though his hands itched with worry as soon as he'd done it.

Arnam was still waiting, and watching.

Turlough reached as invisibly as he could into his pocket for the phone he'd taken off the unconscious guard. It would kill their cover in a few minutes, but perhaps if he could contrive to page Arnam from the man's phone, he could get him away.

From the corner of his eye, he saw the Doctor creep out into the shadowed road. Arnam narrowed his eyes. Behind him, a shadow stirred inside the doors. The blood drained from Turlough's face as they opened.

"Mr. Turlough!" Malkon's little assistant—Daine, that was it—came running down the steps. "So sorry I've kept you waiting. Are you ready to leave?"

It came out in a rasp, his mouth had gone so dry, but he managed to reply without a pause. "Yes, for the last five minutes. Here, let me take that."

He took her case—it was no heavier than his. The Doctor darted into the back of the car, a lanky shadow; Martha Jones waited behind the rear wheel while he stowed Daine's case. He'd have to open the passenger door for Daine—

"Oh, Minister Arnam. About your office's report for Custodian Turlough. I know you'll still only have the raw numbers, but it would help us so much if—"

Thank heaven. He leaned on the roof of the car, trying to look interested while Daine rattled on, until Arnam finally grunted assent. He shut the door after Jack.

"Thank you so much; it will make such a difference to us. Goodnight, Minister."

"Hmph. Do be safe. It's rather late out, for an—occasional driver, shall we say?”

It would have been conspicuous for Turlough to let that slide. "I do know what I'm doing.”  

Arnam cleared his throat. “No doubt.”  

Turlough took Daine's elbow and handed her into her seat. The doors sealed. He put the car into motion. They were away.

  
~*~

The windows had looked entirely opaque from outside, but Jack kept his head down— in Martha's lap; talk about a silver lining— while Turlough let out a held breath and the woman, whoever she was, strapped herself in. Under the chassis of the car, he'd seen unadorned black pumps, slim ankles and pretty round calves, which, while the basis for quite a nice fantasy, was not all that informative.

Whoever she was, she was angry. "You just let the Minister think me your, your—"

"Believe me, Miss Daine, he doesn't for one moment think you're my doxy."

"—your procuress," she finished.

"You are aware that's an urban legend?"

"And I suppose you'd know about such things. Sir."

"Well, I don't," said Jack, "but now you've piqued my curiosity. Can I get up now, by the way?"

"The coast seems clear," said Turlough. Jack lifted his head with a farewell pat to Martha's thighs; she picked up his wrist with her beringed hand and dropped it pointedly; the Doctor shook out his hair and looked on with a smirk. Jack extended his hand to the woman with the calves—and the apple cheeks and the big brown eyes; very nice. "Captain Jack Harkness. That's the Doctor, and the lady with the shiny diamond is Dr. Martha Jones." Outside, shuttered buildings rolled by, empty of life. "What's this about procurers?"

Turlough gave a put-upon sigh; the woman ignored it. "Attris Daine. And it's been in all of the papers—"

"—in the _agony columns_—"

"—about men who'll send a woman to seduce a man that—well, that they fancy. And then after, she'll come out with a story about a protective brother—"

"—or a jealous enforcer—"

She pursed her mouth. "Some man who needs to be placated."

What a miserable repressed little planet Trion must be. "And just one thing will placate him, huh? Seems like a lot of work just to get a guy in bed. Does this procuress at least get to watch?"

Attris looked both scandalized and intrigued. Turlough heaved another sigh. "She might, if she existed. It's never happened. As the captain says, there are easier ways."

"Be that as it may," said Attris, "the Minister's read the same papers I have. You know what it's like for women in government; if anyone were to think that I was mixed up in your—your demimonde—"

"—then you'll have an alibi for what you're really mixed up in, won't you? If it's a morals charge or treason, I know what I'd take."

"Huh." Attris settled more comfortably in her seat. "I suppose if we do pull this off, it mightn't matter what Minister Arnam thinks of my character."

"Glad to see you've found a motivation." Turlough nudged the car's speed up as the narrow streets of the old city began to widen out.

The Doctor stretched his legs out across Martha's ankles. "And very glad you decided to be on our side, Attris Daine."

She blushed; Martha folded her arms on the back of Turlough's seat. "Minister Arnam didn't seem to think much of your character."

"I'm pleased to say I don't consider him my moral arbiter."

"No, I mean, is he an enemy?" persisted Martha. "Or is it just, well, personal?"

"Yes," said Turlough.

"Which?"

Turlough met Jack's eyes in the mirror, the first friendly look he'd given him, for values of friendly equal to_ Back me up, fellow deviant._ But he addressed the Doctor instead: "Do you know how the war began, Doctor? The Governor of Great Trion refused to accept Finnar Hacht's accession to the presidency of the League."

"Ah, right, right, I heard about this one. Graft, was it—or was it bribery? Or illegal preferments—?"

"All three, in fact. But it didn't help matters that he was living out of wedlock with two chorus girls."

Martha arched an eyebrow. "And you've got a couple of chorus girls stashed at home."

"Hardly," drawled Turlough. "But you may have noticed, Trion is a rather—"

"Prussian?" suggested Jack.

"—moralistic society. It's hard for a politician to keep his private life private. It's hard for a political operative, too, but I serve at the President's pleasure; she's the only one who can sack me." A lone car, the first they'd seen in miles, crossed in front, and Turlough slowed to let it pass. It struck Jack how easy their car would be to track, on such an empty road. "Minister for Trade is a slate-level office," continued Turlough. "Elected, with the rest of the upper ministers. Answerable to voters and subject to recall—to the whole suite of electoral checks. Despina offered the position to me, first. I turned it down. _That's _why Arnam despises me."

"Because he was second choice?"

"Because I was first choice, and I passed it over to preserve my ability to fornicate unhindered. Or so he supposes. In practice, there's a lot less fornication and a lot more hindrance than he knows."

"So, no chorus boys, then?" said Martha.

"Shockingly few. It's terribly distressing."

"I hear that," said Jack. "Changing the subject—the spaceport. How far is it?"

"Twenty miles yet, give or take," said Turlough. "Speaking of the spaceport."

"…which you're not actually doing," said Jack, after a moment.

"Despina found my loophole; I couldn't lock down the orbitals." Jack shut his eyes; he'd known their escape was too easy. "We'll have to either  get away before they know we've gone, or take our chances dodging projectiles. Or…"

"Or?" Martha took up the prompt this time. "Worse than running for it?"

"Or go EVA and input the override manually."

"Right. Worse."

"It would guarantee us a clear escape trajectory," argued Turlough, "and if we could find a surface-to-space supplier or a maintenance craft, we could contrive to look like legitimate in-system traffic until we peel out. It would be a slow trip to Earth, though."

"Wait." Jack leaned over the seat until Turlough met his eyes directly. "You're coming with us?"

"I built those satellites." Turlough wrenched his head back around to watch the road. "If we have to take them out from orbit, I'm the logical choice."

"Your logical choice," said Jack, "is to stay here and work on Despina's power base. Give us the codes; I'll handle the EVA if it comes to that."

"Or," said the Doctor, "get us a ship quickly enough, and no one has to go EVA."  

Turlough gave the car another burst of speed. "Ninety thirty eighty-four nineteen," he said sullenly. "The lockout codes. If it comes to that."

.

"Daine," he said, a little later, "it might be best to keep Arnam's good opinion after all. He's only Despina's man out of expedience; we might still need him to make up a slate."

Despite the arch delivery and the subject-changing, Jack knew it for an apology, and from her face, Attris clearly did too.

"Who else can be trusted?" asked the Doctor. He picked, too casually, at the pile of the seat upholstery.

"To take part in a coup, or to form a government?" said Turlough.

"To replace the Master."

He said it almost too quietly to hear. Strange thing to get maudlin about, Jack thought, in the instant before he remembered Harriet Jones. _Didn't he depose you? _

How many governments had the Doctor toppled, in nine hundred years? Thousands? Did he have any idea what had replaced even a hundredth of them? That was a lot of second-guessing; certainly more than a year's worth. Jack couldn't help but feel sorry.

If Turlough knew any of that history, he didn't show it. "My brother Malkon. His people—the Sarn community will follow him, and the militia at home in Turlough. And his staff—without exception, I think. Daine?"

She nodded. "Probably your own secretary as well, sir."

"For all the good he'll do. Much of the opposition, of course, though one has to tread carefully—a slate dominated too heavily by Great Trion or Outworld interests has its own dangers. And some of the more mercenary of the current retinue."  He rattled off names; Jack filed them away without really hearing them.

"And you?" said the Doctor, still in that too-quiet tone.

"Of course," said Turlough. "Assuming I'm not on Earth for the revolution."

"We need you here," said the Doctor.

"If Despina hasn't caught on and raised the alarm against me. If you don't need me to disable the rail guns." He shot a look over his shoulder at the Doctor, who still leaned impassively against the window. "And if I don't choose to go for my own reasons. Maybe I'd like to take a holiday. Eat greengages and _moules mariniere_, see the _Star Wars_ prequels!" ("Don't waste your time," muttered Martha.) "Look up Tegan! How is she, Doctor?"

That hit home; in the space between one streetlight and the next, the Doctor's face hardened.

"You don't know," said Turlough. "Do you?" Jack exchanged a look with Martha; she didn't know, either.

"I haven't seen her since," the Doctor finally said. "You were there, Turlough."

"I remember."

"She wanted an end."

Turlough kept his eyes on the road. "No doubt you'd say the same of me."

Oh, this was not the time, not the time at all. And still some perversity—and not the fun kind, either— made Jack whisper "One more for the club," just loud enough for the Doctor to hear.


	14. Chapter 14

The spaceport was still peopled, even at this hour. And a good thing, too; they drew less attention crossing the stained concrete than they would have anywhere else in Actrion: three semi-respectable spacers, back from shore; and two at least semi-corrupt officials, out for their graft or their smuggled goods. Nothing unusual.

They hurried under the slender passenger liners with their long rows of spindly rampways, and out to the perimeter hangars, where the privately-owned craft berthed. "Look like you know where you're going," said Turlough to Daine.  
           
She looked straight ahead. "How do you think I got my job, sir?"  
          
"Point taken."  
           
Jack sidled up to his ear, sparing a good-natured leer for Daine en route. "What do you have launch clearances for?"  
           
"Very little. I did read the code for the construction lighter I went up in when I toured the orbitals. Knowing government contractors, it probably hasn't been reset since then."  
            
"Can the ship do interstellar?"  
            
"Not well. We might make it in a month or two, if we rationed our air and drank our own urine."

Martha turned her head at that. "That had better be Plan B."

"Don't worry." Turlough steered them down an echoing flight of stairs, and outside onto a loading platform. "Unlicensed traders. Technically, they're not commercial traffic; and so they get bumped down the rota whenever there's a delay. The operators are used to running behind schedule."

"Meaning?" said Martha.

"Meaning we ought to be able to find one that's already been given its launch clearances sitting empty. We can make a launch while the crew are still out carousing. Even if we're noticed, the captain won't want his property damaged; they'll put out a description and issue a warrant before they start slinging rocks." They made their way around a crew loading cargo, and the crew of the next ship, sitting on the gangramp calling out good-natured abuse.

Martha frowned at the line of the taxi platforms, the scarred surface-to-space keels they cradled. There were no public information terminals outside the passenger concourses, but every gangway had a small display screen: operator, registry, scheduled departure time. "But if there are so many ships ready to go, why not just hire one?"

"We can't match the Master's price," said the Doctor flatly. He stalked ahead of them, hands jammed into his coat pockets.

Jack caught Martha's arm before she could dash after him. "When all this is over, we can load up the TARDIS, fly back to port, and dematerialize from here."

"I've done worse than grand theft spaceship," she said, "fighting the Master." She didn't sound placated.

"I know." Jack watched the Doctor's receding back, his mouth set slant like a crooked limb. "We'll end it," he said, too low for the Doctor's hearing, almost too low for Turlough's. "This time, we will stop him."

"What happened?" said Turlough, just as low. "I need to know."

Jack and Martha shared a look. "I'm through telling that story," she said, and stalked ahead to join the Doctor.

Jack gave him a look. "He tortured me and humiliated Martha's family, and whatever we got, the Doctor had ten times worse. And Martha walked the Earth for a year, leading the rebellion, while he tore it apart and burned it down behind her, city by city, for a year."

Turlough hadn't had a lot of news from Earth, but he had the complete run of _Vogue_ for the last decade. "That didn't happen."

"It didn't happen for you because I destroyed the Master's paradox machine. But we were there. We remember."

"The same way I remember the Daleks."

Jack's face softened; the soldier in him, recognizing a fellow campaigner. "Just like that."

Turlough started up the gangway of a likely-looking ship, but jumped away when the hull rang with hammering. "Did he steal Harold Saxon's body? Like he did Nyssa's father's—the one he had when I met him?"

"No." Jack pointed with his chin down the bay; the Doctor and Martha had reached the end of the row and started back. "The Time Lords gave him a new one, in the War."

"And he gave up those regenerations, just to escape—to cover his tracks?"

Jack swallowed. "He did it to spite the Doctor. He died in his arms."

It occurred to Turlough to wonder again, as he had not for many years, what had happened to the Master on Sarn. He had not asked; and the Doctor had sent him away with the Custodians before he could find out. "It may not have been the first time," he said. Jack gave him another look and skimmed a hand down his back, before quickening his steps to catch up the Doctor.

Daine took his place at Turlough's side. "You've got the other copy of those plans?" She patted her attaché case. "Good. Hold on to it, whatever happens."

They found the others conferring over a display screen. "This looks promising," said the Doctor. "Thirty-gram jethric drive, auxiliary fusion ramjets, cleared for takeoff half an hour ago, and from their mass readout—" he tapped the display— "they'll have all the cargo aboard, so no surprises if they head out. It's the best one in this hangar, at least."

It would be a long walk to the next one; and taking out a trampod would mean passing under the surveillance eyes.

"Registered out of Nova Freytis," read Daine, "bound for home." And that settled it; no one would suspect a Freytian shipmaster of anything untoward, and no Freytian would fire on his own ship. "Can you get on board?" said Turlough.

Not get _us _on board; and he knew the Doctor heard the difference. But he didn't press an invitation, and Turlough thought that was more a relief than a slight. It was expected, at least.

"Oh, piece of cake," he said, forcing a smile. He patted his pockets for the sonic screwdriver; and the gangway doors on the next vessel down opened with a clang.

"Hide!" Turlough darted behind the nearest cargo pod, and the others followed.

"Was that really necessary?" said the Doctor. "We look legitimate." He finger-combed his hair, self-consciously.  

"Walking in as if you own the place only works," whispered Martha, "if they don't actually know who owns the place. That crew is bound to have seen this ship's captain."

And they were bound to see anything the Doctor did to the Freytian ship if they stayed out on the gangway. Turlough risked a glance around the pod; the other crew—Androzanian, or he missed his guess—were repositioning the gangway at the cargo hold doors. "They might be at this a long time," Turlough warned.

"Or they might not," said Jack. "We wait."

It was offloading, not onloading, a wheeled cargo train with an autoimpeller at the front. At least they'd have no reason to loiter outside once the hold was emptied—an argument for waiting, he supposed—but there was no telling how many pods to the train. One could calculate the volume of the hold as an upper limit; he tried to do the figures in his head, as a distraction, but it was guesswork multiplied by guesswork.

They'd watched forty pods trundle out when the alarms began.

Jack reached for a weapon that wasn't there; Martha settled her stance and pressed her back to the pod. "Is that for us?"

Daine held up her phone: a public safety bulletin flashed on the screen. Offworld prisoners, two male one female, believed to be in the company of one Trion accomplice. And his picture. Damn. At least they didn't know about Daine.

"Can we get to another hangar without them seeing?" whispered Jack. "Find another ship?"

"I wouldn't like to try. Easier to make a run for this one, before its owner comes to secure it."

"I look official," volunteered Daine. "I could distract them."

The Doctor held her gaze, long enough to be sure she knew how much danger she was walking into. "All right," he said. He thumbed the screwdriver's dial and held it ready.

She walked out into the bay, chin high, and looking angry. "What do you think you're doing? Haven't you heard the alert bells, man? You can't offload uninspected cargo during a class nine emergency situation."

The cars trundled along; the Androzanians argued. The Doctor peered around the corner. "When I say go…" he muttered, "go!"

They went, across the hangar floor to the gangway. Turlough was behind the Doctor, halfway to the ramp, when the first shot rang. He dropped without thinking, Jack hitting the ground behind him, Martha under his arm. The security trampod squealed over the concrete, all its limiters overridden—and nearly collided with the Androzanian cargo train. There was only a moment to move, before the cargo pods could halt, before the gunmen could get over them; they scattered. Turlough and Jack fetched up against an empty cargo pod, several rows into the freight area.

Down the ragged aisle, Daine and Martha huddled behind a crated ramscoop housing; and, through the rows of containers and across the wide expanse of bare concrete floor, Turlough could just see the Doctor, plastered up against the hull of the Freytian trader, shoulder to the keel. He rolled into the well of the retractile landing jets while the port police thundered up the gangway and spread out. Behind the police stalked the port-master, clearly just rousted out of bed, but still wearing the regimental rings of the President's Own.

And then the train's autoimpeller whirred into silence. Far down the hangar, high heels chimed on concrete.

Turlough snuck another glance across the bay, though Jack grabbed his shoulder to keep him down; the Doctor was hidden atop the jet's extended strut, high up in the well and near-invisible from any vantage but theirs. Turlough drew back; Jack didn't move his hand.

"Doctor!" Despina's voice echoed in the distant rafters. Her heel-strokes fell ever nearer. "I thought you were enjoying my hospitality, Doctor. I confess I'm hurt. I thought you quite liked the attentions of lady presidents." She spoke the last words with particular emphasis, and Jack stiffened, but when Turlough looked a question at him, he shrugged.

"But you are quite right, Doctor," she continued. "I did choose Lucy for you. I always knew I might end up in this body. Or you might." Turlough peered around the edge of the cargo pod again; the Doctor's mouth was a slash of white in the shadows of the landing gear.

"So I picked out something pretty," continued Despina. "Just for you. You always did fall hardest for the blondes. Your wondrous Rose—" the Doctor's chin shrank back, and Jack's fingers clenched in his jacket—"oh, yes, I found out all about Rose. My Lady Romana. Your beloved Jo. You know, I looked for a wife with a big round 'O' in her name too—a Mona or Sophie or Zoe." The Doctor twitched at that name, too; Jack shrugged again. "But none of them could compare to my pretty Lucy. So _devoted._ So faithful. Such a—oh, you know, I have no idea if I can do that now, that… mouth thing." Her heels stopped, just beyond the Androzanian cargo. "Turlough was never keen to let me practice. I reckon he would if you asked him." Turlough felt his ears turn red. Jack, who evidently had no boundaries at all, patted his shoulder reassuringly.

"Would you, Doctor?" Despina called. "Would you like to watch me ravish your faithful companion?" The Doctor's jaw twitched, pale skin like a beacon; Turlough ducked back into shadow, willing the Doctor to do the same. Despina's heels clicked a few paces nearer, and her voice fell; he had to strain to listen. "Did you never wonder what I got up to with Adric, when I had him at my mercy?" Turlough felt himself flinch at that; Jack tilted his head inquiringly.  

"Friend?" he mouthed.

Turlough shook his head minutely.

"So hungry for power, that one." Despina was outside the Freytian gangway now; if he moved his head, he would see her. "So eager to be overpowered. Tell me, Doctor— did you ever give in? Enjoy that lush red mouth? Or did you wait too long, and have to drown your guilt in Turlough instead?" Clack of heels—she was turning, listening. "Did you take him in Adric's bed?"

He didn't move, didn't breathe; but maybe his heart was finally pounding loud enough for her hearing, for Despina headed into the cargo stacks, straight toward him.

One glance over Jack's shoulder showed him the women, scuttling to their aid, Martha flexing a length of cut tie-wrap in her hands. Four to one here; guns not twenty meters away. And Despina had not seen Daine. Turlough shook his head violently, shooed them away, out of sight—

—and spun to face Despina.

Jack leapt, caught the wrist of her stunner hand and grappled. Seen, caught, hoping Daine would have the sense to flee, Turlough seized Jack's arms from behind—he had the reach on the man, at least—and wrenched him away from Despina.

When he spun him around, the women were gone. Daine had the neural interface plans; Martha clearly had some soldiering. They'd get to safety.

Time to worry about his own hide, then.

Jack, struggling in earnest, threw his whole weight backward. Turlough let go, and managed to come out of the fall with his feet under him; as he clambered upright, Despina thumbed her stunner to wide range.  
"Ma'am!" Turlough straightened his back. "Thank heavens you're here. I followed them all the way to the port, but they had me rather outnumbered. As you may have noticed."

She pressed the muzzle of the stunner to Jack's chin, a placeholder, and reached out and stroked Turlough's cheek. Soft glove leather caught on a full night's stubble.

"And you'd no idea who my guests were, did you?"

"They were your prisoners." He could feel the force of Jack's glare; he ignored it. "Your enemies."

"Little liar. But no matter." She stepped back, her gun hand never wavering. "And now? Don't tell me you've still never met Doctor John Smith."

Her eyes were fever-bright; there was no lying to them. "He abandoned me." It came out rawer than he meant. "On Sarn. He sent me away."

Jack flinched. Despina saw it, saw whatever was in Turlough's face, and smiled, warm and feral. "I've no doubt he did," she said. Deliberately, she worked the stunner dial, and let them see the mauve kill indicator climb. "No doubt at all. It's what he does. Don't you!" she called, sudden sharp echoes rising. "Don't you, Doctor?"

"Well," she said, still speaking to the rafters, "Perhaps it's time he had the chance to redeem himself. Doctor!" With gestures of her stunner, she circled them round in the narrow aisle until she could see the ship. Turlough stood still, hoping the Doctor was still well-hidden, or better, gone. "Doctor, I have your friends here." She shooed them back into the shadow of the pod, looking sidelong all the while at the Doctor's hiding place.

"Turlough, it's all right." There was a note of panic in Jack's voice. "Whatever happens, I'll be all right."

"Don't be a fool," snapped Turlough.

"This isn't heroism! I—" Despina laid the stunner to his lips and silenced him.  
   
"Your two_ troublesome_ friends," said Despina. "Come out, and give yourself up, and you'll see them again. Otherwise…" She smiled warmly at the Doctor's blind, and shot Jack between the eyes.

He fell all at once to the concrete, steam curling from a pinpoint hole above his nose. The scents of ozone and burnt hair crackled through the air.

"You've killed him." Turlough's own voice sounded foreign, half an octave too high and from too far away. "There was no need for that! He would have come quietly."

"Oh, but it pleased me to do it." She grabbed his collar and marched him out into the aisle, stunner—warm, still glowing mauve with power—pressed to his throat.

He had to step over the body.

And then they were in the open, under the humming yellow lights. "Well, Doctor? What is it to be?" She traced the line of his neck with the gun, an obscene caress. "I have another six billion hostages back on Earth; surely this one is superfluous." Turlough's eyes streamed; she brushed away the tears with the muzzle. He choked down one sob, let the next one out. This was his fault, his irredeemable miscalculation—

And the Doctor dropped from the landing strut, his hands in the air. "Doctor, no!"

He crossed the floor, slowly, and held out his hand for the gun. She laughed, and shoved Turlough into his arms instead. Turlough's knees buckled; the Doctor held him up. "I didn't abandon you," he said; Turlough wasn't sure which of them he spoke to. "I wouldn't have. I never meant you to think— that I—"  

Despina snorted. "Tell it to Captain Harkness."

The Doctor's face twisted, suddenly ugly. "And I never touched Adric, either!"

She cocked one golden brow. "Your loss. Guards! Have them brought to my ship." She spun down the stunner, waved the green indicator in Turlough's face. "Let's make sure they get there, shall we?" And fired.


	15. Chapter 15

_Thirteen years ago, or twenty-five, or five lifetimes:_

They gave him a dead boy's room, and that was so much like the school, and the camp, and the barracks, that for the first time Turlough thought he might actually be able to kill the Doctor.

Of course he couldn't. He'd been a gravitics officer; he only dealt with death at a remove of miles, of light-seconds, even. He'd never seen anyone killed up close until the _Abraxis_ was boarded; he had no more idea how to bash a man's head in than how to build his own starship from bicycle parts and string.  

And the Doctor would look at Turlough like he already knew his secret, and wasn't worried at all. That alone should have made him want to kill the man—certainly, he'd thought enough about killing the teachers who  assumed him as ignorant and provincial as their other charges; of killing Carbry, who _did _know his secrets and rubbed his face in them at every visit.

But instead it only made him want to—fluster the man. Wrong-foot him, _prove _in whatever way he could that Vislor Turlough was someone to be reckoned with.

Even coming clean about the Black Guardian didn't do that—though he thought, by the end of the race, that he'd impressed the Doctor at least a little bit. They'd worked together well, bringing the Eternals' ship in; the Doctor had treated him like an ally.

But then he sent him back to the TARDIS, to the dead boy's books and maps and little alien trinkets. Like living in someone else's mausoleum. By the time the Doctor came by, with his inevitable questions, Turlough had convinced himself he'd only imagined the Doctor's pride.

"He promised to take me away." He sat on the narrow bed, feet crossed, picture of the repentant schoolboy. "Well, I didn't know how else to get off Earth. It's not my home; I should never have been there."

The Doctor leaned against the door, in his shirtsleeves and slippers, impassive. "But how did you come to be on Earth?"

And that was the question, wasn't it? Turlough looked at his shoes. This was a harder thing to speak of than his deal with the Guardian: shame beyond his own honor; crimes affecting more than just himself. "I chose the wrong friends," he said at last.

When the silence dragged on, he looked up, ready to do whatever he needed to distract the Doctor if he pressed for details, if he asked if he were in trouble or needed help. But the Doctor only gave him a shrewd look and said "Well, you're welcome to travel with Tegan and me, for a while, if you'd prefer not to go home just yet."

Turlough opened his mouth to answer, but the Doctor cut him off. "Think it over." He smiled, tightly, but not cruelly.

He couldn't possibly mean to leave it there. "And that's it?" protested Turlough. "All is forgiven, just like that? Doctor, I came aboard your TARDIS to kill you."

"But you didn't," said the Doctor, with that same little smile. "In fact I don't believe you even tried."

From anyone else, it might have been absolution; from the Doctor, in that light, distracted tone, it sounded like a challenge. _I was trapped in an air shaft_ was no kind of answer; and he would not say, _I was afraid. _

He gave the only other answer he had ready, and dropped to his knees at the Doctor's feet. "I didn't want to kill you." It came out hoarse; he thought it was that, and not his words, that made the Doctor's pupils flare, just a little. Without blinking, without looking away, he laid one hand on the Doctor's thigh. The Doctor froze, and Turlough dared to slide his hand higher.

Too much, too fast; the Doctor caught his wrist and lifted his hand away. "Turlough." He still didn't let go. "You have nothing to prove."

"To you, maybe." Turlough yanked his hand away, but stayed on his knees, defiant.

The Doctor reached out before he could shrink or stand up, and touched his cheek, lightly, briefly.  "To anyone."

.

With anyone else, Turlough might have left it at that; he'd never had the patience to woo the sort of man who liked the thought of his own scruples more than the reality of a pretty youth sucking his cock. But he couldn't stop wanting it, even after he realized it might not secure his place on the TARDIS at all.

Tegan went about in abbreviated skirts that showed every inch of her leg and thigh. He thought of doing the same— _mutatis mutandis_, of course—once he properly noticed her, and her stray-cat affection for the Doctor. But even loosening his tie was a trial, ever since Less Trion. He'd been detained there between the _Abraxis _and exile to Brendon, five months, under guards too tired and overworked to waste effort on discipline, when they could just strip miscreants naked and throw them into the unshaded yard, let shame and the attenuated atmosphere do their work for them.

Turlough's turn hadn't come—by design, he thought—until his shipmates had mostly been tried and transferred away. He'd responded to some taunt, during the broadcast of his father's trial; nothing witty, on either end, but it turned into shouting, and then shoving, and then at dawn the guards came for him.

He wasn't scared, not really; despite the trial, and the verdict, he _was_ Enzel Turlough's son. And after an hour—just when the sunlight began to turn from warmth to a prickle on his skin, electric and oddly cold—one guard tossed him a tube of zinc oxide cream. He'd unsealed it and squeezed it out onto his fingers before he felt his skin crackle with more than sunlight. And looked up and saw the eyes.

All around the yard, nearly every guard in the place and a good half of the prisoners—conscripts from Actrion, serfs from the districts, men with no love lost for thanes and their sons—lounged in the shade, watching him. Waiting for him to put on a show.

And he did. He looked once around the quadrangle; met their eyes, a pair at time, until he couldn't anymore. And then stood up straight and slathered the cream over his shoulders, his arms and legs and what he could reach of his back—men had hooted, laughed, called out suggestions and offers— and finally, shown off everything.

And it would take a display that flagrant to make the Doctor pay attention. Turlough didn't have the stomach for it.

He'd have to try a more direct approach.

.

On the Eye of Orion, he found the Doctor and Tegan in the kitchen at the end of a day, with their heads together over their tea. They both smiled at him when he came in—Tegan's smile was a rare gift, and he took it as a good sign—and the Doctor slid over on the bench to make room. Which took the smile off Tegan's face, but then one couldn't have everything. Turlough sat close, leaned closer, pressed his thigh to the Doctor's under the table, until Tegan took herself off to bed.

"Turlough." Only now did he slide away; and only by inches, not even enough to let the chill in between them. "Was that really necessary?"

"What?" he said innocently.

The Doctor gave him a mock-severe look, or else a severe look that failed entirely. "Goading Tegan like that."

"Oh, did I upset her?" He closed the gap between them. "That wasn't my intent."

The Doctor took in a deep breath, as though preparing for a very long speech. "Turlough…"

Turlough smiled. "You know, you were wrong, earlier, Doctor."

"Well, that narrows it down." And derailed the speech; the Doctor's breath came out quicker than it might have. "About what?"

"I do have something to prove to you." He laid a hand high on the Doctor's thigh. "Since you don't seem convinced yet."

"Turlough. Turlough, I am convinced that this—" Turlough was already sinking to his knees, right there under the table— "this is almost certainly not a good idea."

Turlough looked up. "That wasn't the question." He opened the Doctor's flies. Just that much had him dizzily hard; he laid his head on the Doctor's thigh and breathed him in, and the Doctor allowed it. More than allowed—the Doctor pushed back the table, to look down at him and stroke his hair.

The Doctor's pupils were blown, black. "You're sure?"

In answer, Turlough took out his cock. It was hard, and that was all the encouragement he needed. He stroked him, went down. The Doctor's skin here was cooler than a human's, sweeter than a Trion's, and his pulse underneath thrummed rapidly. Turlough took him in halfway, sucked him and worked him with his tongue, determined to make the Doctor want this as much as he did.

The Doctor stroked his hair, his cheek; traced his lips where they stretched. His thighs, through the thin flannel trousers, quivered and trembled under Turlough's hands.

Turlough pulled off with a wet noise, held the Doctor's hand against his cheek, rubbed his thumb over his lips. "Please," he rasped, and opened his mouth for him; and the Doctor finally, finally, thrust up over his tongue, while Turlough held his hipbones and let him move. Faster thrusts, and more erratic—every nerve in Turlough's mouth seemed to go straight to his cock. The Doctor cried out, quietly, but again and again until the cries all ran together, and he came on one long moan, in Turlough's mouth.  

Turlough kept sucking and swallowing until the Doctor took his face in his hands and lifted him off.

This was what it took to fluster him properly, then; the Doctor slumped back against the paneled wall, still panting. "Oh, my." He smiled, a little shakily, and reached down to stroke Turlough's cheek again, and then to take Turlough's hand and help him to his feet.

"And you?" The smile wasn't so shaky this time. He gave Turlough a little shove, back against the kitchen table, and stroked his thighs with his thumbs, outlining his erection through the fabric of his trousers. "What do you want?" What the Doctor wanted was clear; he leaned in and breathed over Turlough's cock.

Turlough scrabbled for a grip on the tabletop, but when he looked up and saw the door, right there in front of them, his hands went to fists: the Doctor was still hanging out of his pants, debauched and uncaring in his shirtsleeves, but Turlough, hard and in full view of the door, felt completely naked, even with his tie knotted and all his buttons done up. "Not here."

"No?" The Doctor still breathed hard; he smoothed his hands up over Turlough's thighs, and just that made Turlough hiss through his teeth. "Is this about comfort or dignity?"

"Does it matter?" His voice cracked on the last word; so much for dignity.

"No; only insomuch as you didn't show much concern for mine. On either count."

"I didn't hear you objecting."

"So you didn't." The Doctor stood and tucked himself in, and handed Turlough up from the table. "Elsewhere, then."

Elsewhere sounded good to Turlough, and it must have shown in his face; they didn't even make it out the door before the Doctor pressed Turlough to the wall and kissed him.

Turlough gasped into the kiss. He had done this much less than… than anything else, really, and he hadn't thought he was this hungry for it, but almost instantly he opened his mouth, sucked in the Doctor's tongue and let the Doctor devour him. He thrust up against his thigh and whimpered into his mouth.

"Sure you don't want to take the edge off first?" Despite having come, the Doctor was panting almost as hard as he was.

"Bed."

"Right."

They stumbled down the corridor, tangled up in each other, Turlough too busy leaning in to steal kisses to notice where the Doctor steered him. But they came finally to an unfamiliar door, to a big white room with a big white bed, and it wasn't Turlough's. That answered the question of whether the Doctor slept, and where, supposing of course that this was the Doctor's room. Even if it wasn't, it was the right room; Turlough knew he couldn't possibly do this with dead Adric's books and trinkets all around.

Or with the Doctor looking at him so intently. It was so much harder to be on one's back than on one's knees, but Turlough knew that was where he would be, where he would want to be, soon.

So when the Doctor reached for the lamp, Turlough caught his hand. "No. Leave it off." In the sepia glow from the roundels, he could see only the outline of the Doctor's face, and a glimmer of his eyes when he moved.  
Maybe the Doctor could see more; he caught Turlough's chin again and studied him. "All right." And then there they were, in the dark, with a bed to themselves and a door shutting out the rest of the world, and Turlough had never done anything remotely like this before.

He hung onto the Doctor's shoulders and kissed him again, and again, and finally the Doctor pulled him down onto the bed and rolled them over, straddled Turlough's legs and undid his trousers. Turlough couldn't help but moan, just a little, and the Doctor wasted no more time; his mouth came down cool and wet and perfect, perfect, perfect, and Turlough was spasming almost at once.

The Doctor swallowed, held him in his mouth until Turlough lay shaking and spent, and then stroked him gently with his fingertips while Turlough's breathing quieted. Only when Turlough made a little noise of contentment and petted the Doctor's fine hair did he reach up and find the knot in Turlough's tie. His fingers hesitated.

"Yes," said Turlough, and the Doctor slowly unknotted his tie, let it hang loose while he undid Turlough's buttons. He was so close, his weight on his elbows but the whole lanky stretch of his body above and against and around him, long legs laced between his. He breathed in Turlough's ear while he worked, and down Turlough's neck, and against each patch of skin that he bared. Turlough's pulse knocked against his skin in a dozen places, so hard he felt the Doctor must feel it too. The Doctor opened his shirt all the way down, and ran fingertips all the way up over Turlough's bare chest, right up over his collarbones, to his shoulders and the trailing wings of his collar.

Turlough shuddered, and the Doctor halted. "No?"

Turlough didn't want to say anything but 'yes' to him; he swallowed instead, and slid up the bed and shrugged out of his sleeves on his own. His skin prickled in the air, tugging at the edges of the brand. He reached for the Doctor to keep from wrapping his arms around his own body, and slid his hands up under the loose tails of his shirt. The first inch of skin under his hands was enough to make the Doctor hiss through his teeth, and he couldn't make himself stir any further. "What about you?" He tapped the words out with drunken care.

"Yes," said the Doctor, on a long shaky breath; he went to work on his own buttons with much more alacrity than he'd undone Turlough's. Turlough kicked his shoes off and skinned out of his trousers, and when he was naked at last there was the Doctor, kneeling in front of him, just as naked, his cock filling up again and standing away from his long, pale thighs. Everything about him was long and pale: his fingers where they spread over his knees, his neck where the hair hung, just too long. Turlough was brushing it away before he knew he'd lifted his hand, and leaning in to press his lips below the Doctor's ear. The Doctor let out another short, quiet moan and pulled Turlough close, skin to skin. The last gasp of air between them buffeted the hairs on Turlough's arms, bristling like electricity; and it was Turlough who took the Doctor's head in his hands and kissed his mouth again.

They kissed like that for a long time, Turlough's thigh wedged between the Doctor's, his cock pressed into the hollow of the Doctor's hip and the Doctor's hard against his abdomen. He'd never felt so much skin that wasn't his, and didn't know where to put his hands, but the Doctor was just clutching hard at his shoulder and his waist, and so it must not matter much, he supposed; he stroked the Doctor's shoulders, the line of his spine, everything he could reach. And he was right, it didn't matter at all.

Not for a while, at least; not until he was getting hard again, and the Doctor was thrusting against his belly like he had every intention of coming there. Turlough broke away from the kiss, drew back just enough to make the Doctor sigh. He took the Doctor's cock in hand again, felt the weight of it. He could take this, he was sure. "I want you inside me."

The Doctor's head fell against Turlough's shoulder. "You're sure?" he said again.

In answer, Turlough turned in his arms and stretched out on the bed, one leg drawn up a little, cheek pillowed on the rucked-up sheets. The Doctor's hand followed his thigh, up and all the way up. With the pad of his thumb, he traced one stroke along Turlough's tight-drawn balls and up between his buttocks; Turlough's hole clenched, as hungry as his mouth had been.  

The Doctor's hand was steady, but when he spoke his voice was—finally!— breathy and faint. "We'll need something. To—"

"I don't need anything."

"Maybe not, but _I _do." And that tone was so familiar Turlough had to turn to hide his grin. "Just a—just, hold on." And he was out of bed, through a hidden door to a washroom and through another door, reflected in the mirror, to a cupboard. The cupboard looked like it must extend right through the corridor outside, or even block the hall door, though such tricks of perspective no longer surprised Turlough. "I must have picked up something suitable on Omphisarga, some lotion or liniment or— oh, this should do." He almost sprinted back— Turlough caught the briefest glimpse of him, white belly and red cock, under the white lights before he shut the door; and he knew the Doctor had seen him, lying on his side, hand on his own cock. The Doctor set a pot of something down beside the pillows, grinned shakily, and kissed him hard. "Turn around."  

Turlough did, and the Doctor knelt behind him and pressed close, kissed his shoulders and nape and the space between his shoulder blades. He kneaded his shoulders and the planes of his back; the touch was bare and gentle and needy and like nothing in Turlough's experience; he trembled against the Doctor's hands, heaving breaths that did not fill the space inside him.

It was a loss and a relief when the Doctor hauled him close again with an arm around his chest, and kissed his neck, and cradled his cock and toyed with it, almost idly, making him gasp and plead, and plead, until he lost all words to plead with. At last he let him go, and slid his hand between their bodies and stroked between Turlough's buttocks with cool dry fingers, while Turlough's body trembled and tried to open for him. When the Doctor let him go again, to slick his hands and his cock, he trembled too.

As needy as Turlough now, he slid his fingers in, two at once, all the way, slowly, but not stopping. Turlough could not stifle a noise as the Doctor searched out the tenderest parts of him. Trions had no convenient little nerve bundle here, like the humans did; the roots of the gland spread out in a half-moon, no different to touch than—Turlough gasped and thrust back onto the Doctor's fingers. "There. Oh."

The Doctor stroked him inside, slow and steady, until he had mapped out the full limits of that sensitive ring, and then he went straight for its center and crooked his fingers. Turlough bit his lip on a cry.

"It's all right," the Doctor panted in his ear. His own voice was ragged. He licked the corner of Turlough's mouth. "No one will hear." He worked his fingers in even deeper and Turlough whimpered, shamefully.

"Please, Doctor, now, please, inside me." Even as he said it, he clenched around the Doctor's fingers, his body grasping and trapping them. "Fuck me. Please."

And as if asking were all it took, the Doctor pressed into him, slow, slow and easy. There was no pain, but Turlough panted as though there were, his body braced against it for so long. It would hurt to be empty again; and when the Doctor settled into him, all the way inside, trembling against his back and breathing quick and shallow against his hair, it hurt to know that he could have this again, for the asking.  
   
And he would have it, again and again, until it was an everyday thing, until he could ask without begging. He fell all at once against the Doctor's chest, taking him in even deeper, and the Doctor groaned and thrust, shallowly and not nearly enough. They collapsed onto the bed, legs tangled, the Doctor clutching him hard with one arm across his chest.

Turlough had done this with boys his own age, half-dressed and silently, seldom with anything more than spit to ease the way; the times he'd been on the bottom, the other boy had barely got all the way inside before spilling.   

This was nothing like that. The Doctor, even as desperate and hungry as he was, knew what he was doing; he fucked Turlough with long, deep strokes, opening him all the way with each thrust. It wasn't just being split open— it was being caressed from inside, being worn away, hollowed out layer by layer like an underground stream. He gasped, and he cried out, and finally he almost sobbed with it, lying splayed on the white sheets, fingers clenched, the Doctor's arms holding him up and the Doctor's breath faster and louder in his ear. The Doctor cried out wordlessly; his thrusts grew ragged, and he fell against Turlough's back and stripped Turlough's cock, once, twice. Climax took him, seized him, wrung him dry. The Doctor fucked him all the way through it, deep and hard and rhythmic, but before Turlough had quite done with the aftershocks he moaned low and loud, went still and clutched him hard at his hip and over his heart.  

They gasped together, breaths synching as they slowed, and finally the Doctor whispered "Easy, easy there" and pulled out of him. That did hurt, more than anything that had come before; and though the pain helped with the sudden emptiness, Turlough still couldn't help flinching. The Doctor pressed his forehead to Turlough's shoulder and stroked his arm, gentling him; he brushed the edge of the brand, and Turlough flinched again. "What's this?" His fingers hovered just at its edge.

"Just an old scar. It's nothing." But he rolled over, ripping the brand out of the Doctor's reach. The Doctor didn't press, just reached out for Turlough's other shoulder and patted him, as if reassuring himself Turlough was still there, and breathed heavily into the pillows for a while longer.  
When he finally seemed to relax, all of a sudden, Turlough got up from the bed.

"You're going?" Not quite asleep, then.

"Just to wash," he said. And then he was bound to that.

The washroom light exposed him, exposed everything; he avoided his own glance in the mirror, and he felt as though the light were still on him when he went back into the dimness of the bedroom. The Doctor lay under the covers, now, arms splayed over the pillows and an uncomplicated little smile around the edge of his mouth; it came all the way out when he saw Turlough. He made room beside him. Unsure just what to do, Turlough lay down on his side, propped on his arm, and watched the Doctor's face. "This is the part I'm not so good at."

"No, nor I."

"No?" And that made it easier; Turlough smiled. "Do you not usually stick around this long?"

The Doctor's own smile turned wry. "It—complicates things, getting involved with. With someone who's traveling with me."

So he had done this before, then. All Turlough knew was what Tegan said Adric had told her about Romana, and Turlough really didn't want to mention any of those names in this bed. "Why does this need to be complicated?" he said instead, and skimmed one hand up the Doctor's leg. The Doctor not only allowed the liberty, but stretched under his hand and leaned up into the touch.  

It wasn't that he had no more boundaries—that was very clear— but that bodily modesty seemed to be a single line for him, and having made up his mind to let Turlough cross it, he granted Turlough freedom to look and touch however he would. Turlough's modesty did not work that way, but he would happily take full advantage of the Doctor's physical ease with him. He repeated the caress, with fingernails this time, and daringly whispered "Go wash up; I want to suck your cock again."

The Doctor's head fell back against the pillows. "This is why I try to keep this sort of thing off the TARDIS," he groaned. "You're going to be the death of me."

"You can keep up," said Turlough. "What else is that double vascular system good for?"

The Doctor smiled innocently, or as innocently as a man can look when he's reaching for one's balls, and showed him. And kept showing him for some time. Not needing to breathe seemed to be key.

Turlough had never learned to sleep deeply in a strange bed; he kept waking, just long enough to feel the Doctor's eyes on him, or stretch and lean into his caress. At last the Doctor's stillness brought him to full wakefulness. He lay asleep—which answered that question—still naked, still not nearly warm enough, and looking happy, though not uncomplicatedly so.

It was Turlough's cue to slip back to his own room, but he stayed; and this time, he slept soundly enough to miss the Doctor's rising.

.

The Doctor, in the days that followed, seemed embarrassed. Not by Turlough himself, though it took a while for Turlough to figure that out, the predictable result of the Doctor's flusterment and Turlough's reluctance to ask being a tendency on both their parts to drag the other party into dark rooms in lieu of talking. Rather, he was embarrassed by the very idea of the affair: having to think of himself as a creature who lusted and needed; having to remember, whenever he looked Turlough in the eye, that Turlough had seen him pleading, moaning, reduced to his flesh.

He dealt with it by seldom looking Turlough in the eye, and never mentioning their dealings, except in medias res. The approach sat well enough with Turlough's own modesty, and with the codes he'd learned in military school and at Brendon for dealing with this sort of thing: innuendo was one thing, was, when approached with taste and a judicious wit, a very fine thing indeed, but one certainly didn't—a Turlough wouldn't—go in for public displays of affection. One saved it, for private moments.

Though there was no keeping it from Tegan, of course. She cornered Turlough on the second day. "All right, Turlough. Out with it."

"Out with what?"

"With whatever's up between you and the Doctor. If you've been fighting—"

"Tegan. I swear, things between the Doctor and myself have never been better." It would have sounded convincing, too, if he could have managed not to blush.

Her eyes went very wide, then very narrow. "You didn't. You—no, what am I saying, of course you did." She shook her head. "I just hope you know what you're doing, Turlough."

"It doesn't matter," he said, with a shrug. "I rather think the Doctor knows enough for both of us." He smiled beatifically.

"Just don't come crying to me when it goes wrong," said Tegan. And, really, it was her own fault if she was jealous; she could have seduced the Doctor, too, if she'd really wanted to. Some instinct, either of kindness or of self-preservation, prevented Turlough from saying so, though not until he'd already opened his mouth.

"You don't seem surprised," he said instead.

Tegan laughed. "Turlough, no offense, but no one who's known you for five minutes would be surprised."

"I'll take that as a complement on my great candor and transparency," he said. "And the Doctor?"

And Tegan did look thoughtful at that. "Maybe I am a little surprised."

"Because you expected him to adhere to your human codes, just because he looks like one of you?"

"Because he pushed Adric away so hard," she said; and there was no good answer to that. "Though I suppose you are a _little _older than he was," she added, which made it worse, really. But it also gave him an excuse to taunt Tegan about her advanced age; and that never went amiss.


	16. Chapter 16

"Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about the Doctor." Sir Alastair sat down at the head of the briefing room table, unconsciously usurping Colonel Mace's chair. Or maybe consciously; one never knew. "He'll come back in his own time. Always does."

"Without the TARDIS?  It's been a week—they could be anywhere." The TARDIS had not moved from her garden; even the neighbors had started to notice it. UNIT still guarded the warehouse, and the transmat, but they had found the place empty; of the Doctor, Martha, and Jack, there was no sign.  
      
"Oh, I trust the Doctor to take care of himself. No, it's these insects that worry me."  
      
"They're being quiet for the moment." The Tractators had swarmed UNIT troops approaching their communication machines—had smothered soldiers with gouts of earth in South Carolina, and in Hyderabad had torn three men limb from limb in gravitic fields. But that had been the limit of their aggression; they had acceded to the occupation of the Despex factories, and of the upper levels of the associated mines, without violence, even without notice.  
      
"Yes. Too quiet."  
      
"You know, either you've mellowed with age, or else you've always had that sense of humor and I just didn't notice."  
      
"I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about, Miss Smith," he said, deadpan until she smiled first. "But I don't trust that Addison chap," he continued, "nor his counterparts, not to have something up their sleeves."  
      
"Or in their heads." The door opened. "Speaking of. Any luck, Harry?"  
      
Harry came into the briefing room, arms full of charts—whatever happened to the paperless office, anyway; surely by now they should have flat screens on every surface? "Oh, possibly, possibly."

Colonel Mace ushered in a few of his people—Sarah could never keep the current HQ staff straight—shut the door and took the chair next to the Brigadier's without a word. "Let's make this quick, shall we? Captain Price:  status of the Despex recall?"

"Within the EU and Japan, some eighty percent of extant Despex-containing products are estimated to have been returned to safe-disposal points. Elsewhere, collection has been much less successful, but public safety warnings should have saturated every market in which Despex has been sold; people may be keeping it, but they're not wearing it."

"That's a good start. Have media time acquired for a more targeted run of safety announcements, just for the holdouts; see if we can get the return rate up."

"It might also be wise to include disposal guidelines," suggested Sarah, "for consumers who can't reach a turn-in point."

"Agreed. Do it. Now, Mr. Sullivan. About the medical team's request."

"Ah, yes." Harry rifled through his charts expectantly.

"Denied."

"Colonel?"

"Mr. Addison's lawyers, and the attorneys for Despex, have been pressuring very publicly for his release. The only official complaints against him as yet are violations of worker-protection statutes and consumer safety regulations. We may not even be allowed to hold him for questioning much longer; I am not jeopardizing our custody of the man by authorizing you to perform highly invasive medical procedures on him against his will. No spinal tap. That's final."

"Well, how else am I supposed to—"

Sir Alastair cut Harry off. "Colonel Mace. Am I to understand that you rank the Tractators a lesser threat than Edmund Addison's lawyers?"

Mace swiveled in his chair. "Sir Alastair. Not to make light of the Slitheen menace, but their attack on Downing Street very likely saved UNIT the scandal of a rash of courts-martial such as this organization has never seen. Secret prisons—disappearances—prisoners traded off to Torchwood like chattel. Geneva was this close to shutting UK operations down entirely."

Sir Alastair's face was stony, but only, Sarah knew, because everyone here had already heard his catalog of the failings of every head of UNIT since Bambera had followed her lover to elfland.

"You were fortunate, Sir Alastair," Mace continued. "UNIT in your day had a friendly relationship to the media." He nodded to Sarah Jane, graciously enough. "The Saxon debacle put an end to that. I worked very hard to keep this organization's recent history out of the press. I am not going to throw away our good standing for the sake of one dubious medical experiment."

"Well, medically, there's nothing dubious about it," protested Harry. "Postmortems of every casualty among the Despex factory workers and management have turned up Despex fibers in the spine and corpus callosum; we've even exhumed some of the victims from the warehouse killings and found Despex traces. That poor sod they took out of the excavator in Johannesburg scarcely had any of his own nervous tissue left. Now there's every chance that hundreds or thousands of Despex workers—and maybe even ordinary people who wore the stuff—might be contaminated as well; but there's no way we can gauge the danger, to them or the public, without some tests."

"Invasive tests."

"Well, I suppose so, yes."

"Biopsies, spinal taps, and—" Mace consulted his clipboard—"three distinct types of radioactive imaging."

"…yes."

"Find a volunteer, and I'll allow it."

"There's got to be someone; talk to Laura Wheare," Sarah murmured, while one of the specialists projected a map on the screen. It was no one she knew. Sarah still hadn't got used to the size of UNIT's research staff. A good thing, having so many experts about; but a far cry from the days of one lone scientific advisor...  

"Moving on," said Mace, "to the seismography report." Sarah flipped to a clean page in her notebook; she'd want to check UNIT's information against Mr. Smith's.

When the raids had severed communication with their human Graves, the Tractators had kept excavating. Rough work, generally; it seemed they needed their human slaves to run the polishing equipment. UNIT was watching the area around all their nests, by sight and by every seismic imaging technique, to make sure they didn't try to tunnel away.  
      
So far, they'd stayed put, and their activity levels were dropping—perhaps they needed orders to strike up new tasks, once they finished the last ones they'd been given. But it didn't hurt to go looking for evidence of other nests, now that they knew what Tractator activity looked like to a seismograph.  
      
The researcher cleared his throat. "Right. We haven't found actually found any exact matches to the known patterns of Tractator activity—though, of course, we don't know how much those patterns vary."

"What about inexact matches?" said Price.

The man looked sheepish. "Well, we do have a few leads." He brought up a scatter of color-coded flags. "In descending order of match strength—Manhattan Island, Central Paris. Milan. Tokyo...." Cities, every flag was in a city, and not in mining towns, either. "Of course," the researcher said, "these seismic readings could have other causes. Industry... transportation..."

"In other words," said Sir Alastair. "You've located a half a dozen cities with subways. Well done."

But Sarah slipped out a few minutes later to call Mr. Smith. His readings confirmed UNIT's seismography. If the Tractators were actively tunnelling, away from the known sites, they weren't doing it anywhere uncontaminated by urban noise.

She returned as the briefing was winding down. Blowing up the mines was still being debated in Geneva, with a squadron of Despex lawyers in attendance; and in the meantime, Tractators were still nearly impervious to bullets. "Always the way, isn't it?" said Sarah.

"One gets used to it," observed Sir Alastair.

  
~*~

  
"No, don't throw that off." Someone was tucking a blanket up to his chin. "You're still shocky, you need to keep warm. Here."

Turlough had pins-and-needles everywhere, and his head was flat on the mattress. "Why don't I have any pillows?"

"They're under your feet," said the Doctor.

"Oh, yes, you said. Shock."

"Mm-hmm."

"She shot Captain Harkness," Turlough said, with remarkable equanimity.

"Not for the first time."

"She killed him."

"Not the first time for that, either."

"Doctor, it's not nice to play tricks on someone who's had a—"

"—shock? Sorry about that. We should have warned you about Jack."

"_Warned_ me?" Turlough struggled to sit up, hauling the blanket up with him when the Doctor glowered. "About _him?_"

"About Jack, yeah. Can't stay dead. He's effectively immortal."

"You should talk." Turlough rubbed his neck with half-numb fingers, and took a proper look about. "We're on Despina's private gig."

"Yeah; took off about an hour ago. How long to Earth in this thing?"

"Top speed—two, two and a half days at periapsis. Right now, at least three. That is where we're bound?"

"Got to be." He drummed his fingers on the bedframe, idly, then snatched them back, as if burned.

Turlough hugged his knees and hunched his shoulders in under the blanket. "Did the others get away?" he asked at last.

"The last I saw," the Doctor said. "It's just us here, I'm sure of that." His eyes seemed miles away. "Turlough, I promise you, Martha will get those pictures to the Ministerium. And Jack, if he revived in time."

"And Daine. That's something, I suppose."

"How do you figure our chances of hijacking this thing?"

"How many guards did you count?"

"Six." The Doctor counted it on his fingers, double-checking. "At least."

"Not good, then."

"Hmm." Turlough quirked an eyebrow, hoping for some plan, some idea—that was still the Doctor's strength, wasn't it?—but the Doctor just slouched on the foot of the bed and frowned—volunteering nothing, and giving nothing away.

There were a thousand things Turlough wanted to ask. What he started with, after a long pause, was "What happened on Sarn, with the Master?" The Doctor drew his eyebrows together—a new mannerism, that—and settled his shoulders back into his coat; the gesture seemed to turn his flesh into another garment, another layer between himself and the world. "Because it must have been pretty awful," said Turlough, when he didn't answer, "if you couldn't bear to tell me. Considering what you'd already forgiven me for."

More silence.

"I was sure you'd killed him, of course. But you had to have known I wouldn't hold that against you. So what could have made you send me away, to make sure I never found out?"

And that at least got a reaction. "It wasn't—I never did that." His face opened, just for a moment, before his brow clouded up again, that thunderous expression that should have looked as out of place on this Doctor's young face as on the one Turlough had known, and yet did not. "You had a chance to go home, Turlough." He said it as thought that made it final; as though it were all that mattered.

"You never asked." He couldn't strip the pleading note from his voice; hated how naked it made him sound, in front of this Doctor who revealed nothing. "If I wanted to stay. Let alone_ invited _me. I'd have done anything—"

"—and that's a reason to talk you out of it?" The Doctor leaned like a gargoyle, coat trailing. "I've been an exile; I couldn't ask you to--"

"Do you even listen to yourself anymore?" He spread his hands; the blanket slipped down. "You talked yourself out of going home a hundred times. I was _there,_ remember?"

"It's not the same thing," the Doctor said tightly.   

"Oh, no, sorry; my people weren't trying to acclaim me Lord President." That one hit home; a shadow crossed the Doctor's face. "But I suppose you couldn't have known that; it's not like you asked what sort of world I was going home to." He felt a twinge of shame at enjoying his advantage—his momentary advantage—so much; and not yet shame enough to stop his mouth, it seemed. "And so I wondered—what was it you couldn't tell me? Was it just that you'd grown tired of me? It couldn't just have been killing the Master.

"What about that girl, Peri?" Another hit; Turlough pressed home. "Were you too late in killing him, was that it? What had he done to her in the meantime?"

"Nothing!" the Doctor spat. He subsided back into the coat, hair still trembling. "Peri was fine. She traveled with me. She was fine."

"And I can already tell when you're lying. You're very bad at it, this time round."

"It was nothing to do with Peri." His eyes were as flat as a beetle's. "You want to know what happened on Sarn?  I let him burn," the Doctor said. "I trapped him in the flames and I let him burn, while he pleaded with me for his life. And I stood there and watched him die.

"He burned to death. I was certain of it. I was so certain."

And that was it, the simple truth. His face, at their farewell, had been as bleak as now; and his handshake even colder than before. Shock, thought Turlough. "Numismaton gas," he said, because it was easy to talk about chemistry. "It would have caused enough pyrotechnics to cover any sort of sleight-of-hand. And the healing effects might have helped preserve him."

"I told him he had to accept it." He said it to himself, almost below Turlough's hearing. "Thirteen lives, end of the line, validate your ticket before disembarking. I thought it was so easy."

And easier said than done, thought Turlough. For both of you. "You knew I wouldn't hold it against you," he said. "So you sent me away."

"You had a chance to go home," the Doctor said, mechanically. Dismissively.

"But not a choice," said Turlough. "Not really. If you hadn't shut me out of your, your—"

"My what? Guilt?" He spat the word like an obscenity. "My overwhelming contrition, over executing a murderer—a mass murderer, fifty times over?"

Turlough knotted the blanket in his hands. "Your grief."

The Doctor's eyes darkened; he scowled without moving a muscle. "You had a chance to go home," he repeated, and stalked off to stare out the porthole.


	17. Chapter 17

Harry held the exam room door for Laura. "So, want to see what we've learned, thanks to you? You too, old girl—it's fascinating stuff." Sarah Jane, Laura's escort back to the medical wing for her follow-up, fell into step with them, through the vast open laboratory to the desk Harry had commandeered. It was a far cry from the Doctor's day: everything was gleaming and modern, most of the equipment still in its original cases, with the warranty stickers unbroken, even. Half the room was curtained off, people in lab coats running in and out. Sarah was desperately curious, but forbore to ask in front of Laura; she strongly doubted she herself was cleared to see everything in the room.

Harry spread files out over a counter and chivalrously pulled out two lab stools. "Now. You'll be happy to know that one of the contrast media did stick to the Despex beads." He spread a transparency out on the white counter: a full-body shot, with a bright tangle at the nape of the neck. Wispy tendrils reached the skull and out from the spine.

"That's all Despex?" Laura said. "I have that much of the stuff in me?"

"It's actually very little, compared to what we've recovered from some of the bodies," Harry said. Laura did not appear reassured. "In fact, the biopsy was a bit surprising. We found one complete Despex thread—"

"Just the one?" Sarah said.

"—but an awful lot of the little beads, unconnected. More than could possibly have come off the one thread we found." He showed a photograph: a slide of nerve cells, bright specks clustered in the axons and trailing through the cytoplasm like alpine lakes. "Now, we did manage to filter a few short strands—on the order of microns, mind you—out of your spinal fluid. So, that gave us an idea. You see those flasks over on the bench?"  
      
They were lab flasks, the flat-bottomed kind, full of fluid ranging from clear to milky; not nearly as interesting as the curtained alcove beyond, from which loud clacks and scuffling sounds now issued. Sarah held her tongue. "What about them?" said Laura.  
      
"We cooked down some Despex monofilament, in human plasma and a few other media. And when we looked for the breakdown products in your blood, lo and behold!"  
      
Sarah didn't even need to look at the page he flourished. "You've got a blood test for Despex contamination! That will be useful."  
      
"We've already run it on Addison— the lawyers couldn't refuse basic medical care—and he must be chock-full of it."  
      
Laura turned the pages over in her hands. "But how do we get it out? Get rid of it?"  
      
"Ah," said Harry. "Well, that is a little more difficult. But we ought to work something out soon. I'm no expert on this sort of thing, but with the boffins UNIT's got working on it—" He really had just said 'boffins' unironically; Sarah turned away to hide her smirk—  
      
"Harry," she interrupted. "What's behind the curtain?" Whatever it was, Harry's boffins were shouting at it, their shadows thrashing and struggling on the curtain. Soldiers ran in from the corridor, with nets and tarpaulins.  
      
"Tractator." Harry stood up, gathered Laura's file without looking down at the pages. "Testing it for Despex breakdown products. Those communication units, you know; we wondered if they plugged into their nerves as well as ours." He started backing away. "We've had it up here for tests before. It's always been much more…"  
      
"—tractable?"  
      
"I think we might want to give them some room." And sure enough, down came the curtain.  
      
The insect came crashing toward them, dragging curtain and rod together—toward _them,_ Sarah realized; them specifically. She stumbled backwards along the counter, trying to keep Laura behind her and Harry, but the Tractator was faster than anything so ungainly should ever be; it was upon them, almost at once, and its antennae glowed purple. Gravitic field, she thought, and braced for the paralysis.  
      
But the Tractator only shouldered her aside; she fell against a lab bench, just managing to land on papers instead of glassware, and saw the purple nimbus descend over Laura.  
      
For a moment, Laura was held, motionless, feet suspended; and then she fell, and lifted her head, and saw Sarah.  
      
She was on her instantly, mindless, grappling for her wrists. Sarah ducked, twisted; she hesitated for a moment before bringing her knee up, and the moment was enough; Laura kicked her feet out from under her and grabbed her arms as she flailed for balance.  
      
And then, nothing. She held Sarah implacably, but with impossible strength, and dragged her to face the Tractator: the endpoint of the programming she had been given at the mill.  
      
But the Tractator, too, seemed to have accomplished its only goal; it stood calmly, and at last let itself be led back into the alcove.  
      
There was a footstep behind her, and Laura crumpled before she could turn. Sergeant Patel caught Sarah and hauled her to her feet. Harry held Laura awkwardly in one arm.

He groped for the table with the other and laid down his syringe. "Now we know the trigger."

Sarah rubbed her arms. She'd have bruises. "Pity there's no way to know the program."

They kept Laura in the medical wing for observation; Harry thought they might want to observe her for some time. Mickey came to visit, but found her still under sedation. "Wouldn't she be safer someplace else? Someplace with no Tractators?"  

Where is that?" said Sarah. "Just because we haven't found any more nests, it doesn't mean they're not out there."

She and Mickey sat with Laura, while Harry popped in and out with news: her blood was still full of breakdown products, but less of them, not that that meant anything. She woke with no memory of her episode, though seeing Sarah's and Mickey's faces, and the UNIT seal on the wall behind them, she hardly needed filling in.

"I wanted to know, didn't I?" she said. "My fault if I don't like the answer."  
      
"I'll visit again," Sarah said. "Do you want me to bring you anything before I leave—magazines, music?" Mickey, she thought, might be better company.  
      
"If you like." Her face was motionless.  
      
At the nearest newsagent's, Sarah leafed through titles at random. Sport, science, news, fashion—she had no idea what Laura liked to read. Though there was news everywhere about the Despex recall—in the business columns, in the fashion news…  
      
In an interview with the head of Despex, Ltd.'s in-house design team. _"Is the recall a setback? Maybe temporarily," said lead designer Charles Bernhardt, straight from an eighteen-hour day on the workshop floor._

_Such optimism is surprising in a man who saw his entire fall line hauled away by hazmat specialists. His team of designers and seamstresses—and every spare needle in Paris—have been working round-the-clock to remake every garment in Thursday's runway show in silk, Tencel, and a dizzying variety of other fabrics._

_That variety, says Bernhard, is key to his look. "People think of Despex as just being for accessories and sportswear. But what we're really about is flexibility. Think about having your favorite dress in every color and pattern, at the touch of a dial."_  
      
The newsagent harrumphed; Sarah fumbled out coins one-handed, and took her stack of papers without counting out her change.  
      
_Asked if he was worried about the effect of the recall—which has yet to be rescinded in the EU and fourteen other nations—Bernhardt said, "In a way, it's a golden opportunity for us. Anyone who thinks they know what to expect on that runway on Thursday—they're wrong. They're in for a big surprise. And I can't wait to show Paris, and the world, just what Despex can do."  
    _  
Sarah flipped back to the table of contents: _Paris Fashion Week Preview. _  
      
Paris. New York. Milan.__

The seismographic data had led them straight to the Tractators after all.  
      
She sorted her acquisitions into two stacks—_ New Scientist _and the day’s papers for Laura;  _Vogue, Glamour,_ and _Elle_ for Colonel Mace—and hurried back to HQ, whistling.  
      
"Puttin' on the Ritz." She couldn't help herself.

~*~

      
The Doctor watched the homestars recede for hours, slouching against the porthole, brushing away his breath with a coatsleeve as it condensed. He answered Turlough in monosyllables.  
      
The old Doctor had had his silences, too; he'd been downcast, guilty, pettish, sulky, despairing—but by turns. Not, thought Turlough, all at once.

But when the guards came with supper—four of them; Despina was taking no chances—the Doctor seemed to decide he'd sulked long enough. Either that, or the smell of food—from Despina's table, or Turlough missed his guess—was what it took to rouse him.

If he'd known that appetite was all it took to get through to him, Turlough might have just gone to his knees. At least it would have passed the time.  

He steered away from that line of thinking and busied himself laying the little table in the alcove. "I'd have expected her to come herself," he said. The Doctor hovered, lifting the covers of dishes and sniffing with interest.  "Or himself, I suppose. Do Time Lords ever regenerate as the opposite sex?"  
      
The Doctor lifted an eyebrow. "Not often. Ohh, are these quail, these little things with the legs? I love a good quail. "  
      
"Despina keeps a well-stocked galley. Try the grilled figs. It has been done, though?"

The Doctor's eyes narrowed, but he turned the expression on the figs. "Once or twice. If this is about me, though, I warn you, I don't usually have time to take requests. Pot luck is what I get." He dropped sideways into a chair, one elbow on the table, his long legs stretched out in front. "And usually not as nice a spread as this, either. Though I'm never sure about figs. They're full of little wasps—did you know that? These tiny wasps, they lay their eggs in the fig flowers and then they just crawl in after to die. They're like little wasp necropolises, figs. Necropoli? Necropolites?"

Turlough didn't remember him being this obvious about his evasions before. "None of that points me to the right pronoun," he said, perhaps a bit petulantly, and applied himself to his quail.

The Doctor set down his fork. "The Master hasn't regenerated. He's the same person—whatever he's calling himself, whatever gender he's using." And that was clearly as much as he wanted to say. He picked up a fig in his fingers and bit it in half. "Ooh, there's a glaze, a wine, a port wine glaze—all caramelized. Unless those are wasps, those crunchy bits." He frowned expansively at the bitten edge.

He'd made up his mind to be cheerful; to meet Turlough on this ground of food and inane chatter and not on anything that mattered.

Of course, he'd never been one for confidences—he'd never _had_ secrets like this to withhold, thought Turlough; and then the very fact that he could think such a thing made his head spin.

"So tell me what it _means._"  The Doctor looked up from his figs, as taken aback as Turlough himself at the anger in his voice. "That he hasn't regenerated—make me understand why it matters. I can tell he's changed less than you have. Hardly at all, now I know who she is."

"He's changed," said the Doctor flatly. "Don't doubt that. He's more dangerous than ever. What's in that bottle?"

"Don't change the subject." It was some shiraz Turlough had never heard of; he poured two glasses, sipped from one. "You've known him a long time."

"We were at school together." His face didn't change, but his voice might almost have been fond, for one moment. "Lifetimes ago."

Turlough's own schoolmates had been the sons of Governor's men, officers in training, too cowed by the name Turlough to be anything but polite; and human boys, ignorant and provincial and coddled. When he remembered them at all, it was not fondly. "You were rivals, then."

"We were best friends," said the Doctor. He dropped a quail bone back onto his plate and shoved it away. "Despina never told you? Loves to talk about himself, the Master. You should have asked him for stories, all this time you've been in his pocket."

"All the time I was in yours, years ago, you never volunteered any. Maybe if I'd known more I wouldn't have been taken in by her. Please, Doctor. It's just the two of us together against her now. Tell me what I need to know."

The Doctor held his gaze until he felt himself begin to blush; his own face was white and unreadable. "We were children when we met," he finally said. "He helped me with my schoolwork and I stopped the other kids beating him up. Though that stopped when we were older, of course." The Doctor sniffed at his glass, then drank down half his wine with complete disregard for its effects or its flavor.

"No more help with schoolwork?"

"No more keeping him from getting beaten. Not that he needed it by then; no one had any time for violence once we started degree subjects. And we still worked together. We just called it something else, so we could tell ourselves we were upholding the Prydonian tradition of autonomous scholarship." He rolled another mouthful of wine on his tongue. "We were very, very young."

"Called it what-- mutual independent study?" suggested Turlough. "Collaborative self-direction?"

The Doctor gave him a quelling look; this was _his _story. "More like a bilateral trade in… favors." Turlough didn't ask what kind. "Still against the rules, of course, but it was easy to pretend we were only violating the letter of the law. Of course we knew better. Our chapter was all secrecy and backstabbing—we're famous for it, Prydonians. We're taught it, even at that age-- scholars all hoarding their best work, so desperate to have just one idea to claim as their own. And never managing a single original thought, the lot of them."

"Anxiety of influence," muttered Turlough, before he could bite his tongue on the interruption.

"Paranoia of influence, more like. But we worked together, he and I. Even on our degree work." The Doctor knotted his brow. "I had a temporal mechanics project. The theory was beautiful. Utterly far-fetched, of course—nonsense, really, but beautiful nonsense. The maths was mostly beyond me, though. But—my friend— " he drank to cover the stumble—"could do the proofs. Did do."

Rassilon, Turlough thought. Flavia. Borusa. And then the two of them. He set down his glass before he could spill it. "Why can't you say his name?"

"He doesn't have a name." That voice again, flat and implacable. "It was stripped from him: to be uttered neither vocatively nor deictically, nor in all uses referential, in past, present, and future." The cadence was not his. A quote, Turlough realized, and from experience. This had happened to the Doctor.

Very quietly, he said, "But they didn't strip his degree?"

"They couldn't," said the Doctor. "A degree is conferred by the members of the chapter, living and dead. Once a candidate has stood before the Matrix and had his work acclaimed by the aggregate brainwaves of a thousand generations… he's changed, permanently." He met Turlough's eyes; his own were still hard, but his voice was almost gentle, reassuring. "That's one thing even the High Council can't take away."

"And you worked together," Turlough said. "On your degree work."

"Yeah." The Doctor drained his glass. "We did. He was brilliant. In a way he still is." He pushed back his chair and jammed his hands into his pockets.

And fell silent. Turlough carefully stacked his cutlery on his own plate, with the bones and the scraps, looking at his hands; but the Doctor volunteered nothing else. "And that's it?" Turlough said at last. "He was brilliant, and your best friend, and now he wants to kill you."

"Yeah, more or less." Turlough pushed his own chair out and glared until the Doctor opened his eyes. "You don't need to know the rest, Turlough. It's not—"

"Relevant? Not interesting? Not believable—now that I might buy."

"Not actually your business," the Doctor countered." It's just a bit private from here on."

His mouth was tight and pale; Turlough had to close his eyes to remember his smile in the cell, or the open joy he'd put on the Doctor's old face, once. "And does that matter, between you and me?"

"Did it matter between me and him?" The question was rhetorical, as Turlough's had not been.

"You tell me, Doctor."

This was the limit, then; and if he'd pushed this hard, years ago, he'd have known then just what he was to the Doctor, and what he meant. But then the Doctor sat forward all of a sudden, hands on his knees, and said. "You want to know?

"Fine. He worked on my proofs; I'd never have got through them myself. And I helped him with his practicum. With the work that he perverted into the Tissue Compression Eliminator. I never saw where he was going with it. It was the most brilliant theoretical work in miniaturization in three centuries. Completely unexpected—outré, even—but brilliant. The demo model was a bit cobbled-together, but then it only had to work the once."

He spoke rapidly, but with none of the stumbling of his prattle about wasps; even his vowels were fiercer.

"Now I couldn't do any practical tests of my own project without a time capsule; and I couldn't get my own TARDIS until I'd graduated. I was afraid I'd have to stand in front of the Matrix with no real data—just the proofs, and I knew I was going to have a hard enough time passing those off as mine, before a telepathic tribunal. So the night before our exams-- when we were both very drunk, mind you— I persuaded him to use the prototype I'd built to miniaturize the lock on Cardinal Borusa's TARDIS."

He paused for acknowledgement. "Did you get your data?" said Turlough.

The Doctor frowned; it seemed Turlough had failed to grasp the enormity of the crime. "We were lucky we didn't get expelled. Or killed. We ran into a spot of trouble with a chronic loop—all in accordance with my theories, of course—"

"I thought you said they were nonsense."

"And we proved that the universe is a fundamentally nonsensical place. Who's telling this story?"

"Sorry."

"Hrm. So. The theory was sound, but we miscalculated how much temporal stress the chronostat on the Type 64 could handle. So there we were, stuck in a time loop, 'stat about to blow, and I had the bright idea to compress the time-bearing element on the spare with—my friend's—demonstration apparatus." The Doctor peered into his own glass, though it was quite empty.

"I'm going to pretend I know how that would work and let you skip ahead," prompted Turlough.

"Brilliantly, is how it worked. Skipped us out of the loop like a stone off a pond." He said it without a hint of pride.  "'Course, the compressor prototype was burned right out," he added. "Years of work, mostly mine, up in smoke; and the theory alone wasn't likely to pass muster before the cardinals, let alone the Matrix, without a practical demonstration."

He sighed massively. "So I did the only thing I could think of," he said, staring down at his hands and his empty glass. "Broke out another bottle and took him to bed. And when I woke up, it was the middle of the day, less than fifty microspans from my own exam. And he was sitting at the foot of my bed, wearing Master's robes.

"I congratulated him. And he just smiled at me, and he said, 'I had to change my plans at the last minute. But since it was my own work, after all...' And he dropped my notes on the bed—my theory, my experimental data from the night before. And the proofs. And then he said, 'But don't worry, my dear—you can still use my other project, if you don't mind skipping the practicum.'

"'You planned this,' I said.

"And he said 'Planned the destruction of three years' hard work—of _my_ hard work?'

"And I said, 'Last night. You knew what you were going to do when you came back with me. You'd known from the moment you let me reverse the polarity on the device."

"And he just smiled, and he said, 'Have I ever been able to resist seeing you kneel to me, my dear?' And he kissed me, and he said, 'I'll see you at your exam.'"

The Doctor looked up from his hands, face like an accusation. "Is that what you needed to know?"  
      
And it was, if what Turlough had needed to know was that anything the Doctor could share would only drive home how slight their history was, how slender any claim Turlough had on him. Well done, Doctor.  
      
He looked for anything else to say. "You _sat the exam?_" was what came out.  
      
The Doctor shrugged. "For all the good it did me. I had no practicum at all and the worst case of Rassilon's Revenge I've ever had." His voice was still contained, deliberate.  
      
"Everything on your planet must be named after that man," said Turlough. "I don't suppose you passed."

"In front of the Prydonian chapter? No, no sympathy from them at all, much less from the Matrix. And the Master..." He faltered over the name, the first flagging of that all-encompassing anger. "He sat in the audience and watched me fail—worst washout on record, I think it's only been broken once and that was by me on my next try— and then came up and shook my hand and wished me better luck next time."  
      
"Was he sincere?"  
      
"Not that it mattered, but—yeah. I think he really was." He set his glass upside-down on the table, with elaborate care. "And that really was the beginning of the end."    
      
And he meant it, too. "The _beginning?_" sputtered Turlough.  
      
The Doctor's eyes darkened, the spark of anger finally dying. "The rest... doesn't make a very good story."  
      
Or not one the Doctor was willing to tell. Turlough piled the plates back onto the supper tray, to give his hands something to do. "You know, I didn't believe you even could get drunk." Turlough pointed with his chin to the Doctor's empty glass. "Your cheeks aren't even flushed."

"We-ell." The Doctor stretched out in his chair again, crossing his ankles. "It does take a lot of drinking. But, yeah, if you start with Shobogan brandy and spike the pentarassilene—"

"So everything on your planet is named after that man."  
      
He shrugged. "Just the important bits."  
      
"There's not enough of this left to do the job, then," said Turlough, hefting the wine bottle. It was still half full, at least.  
      
"'Fraid not. Still—" the Doctor held out his glass—"that's no reason not to finish it off."  
      
And if there wasn't enough to get properly drunk on, there was enough to let Turlough sleep soundly that night; sound enough not to notice whether the Doctor ever came to bed. And that was something.


	18. Chapter 18

Jack revived back in the cell—someone had been warned about him—and languished there for two days. On day three, Attris Daine came and unlocked the door. She had bright eyes with dark circles under them. "Captain Harkness. I'm sorry for the delay; Martha has had to lie low, and I gambled that you'd be safe enough here for a short while. I hope I was correct?"  
      
"All parts present and accounted for." He fell into an easy step beside her. "Though I seem to be a bit out of the loop. I take it the Ministerium believed your evidence?"  
      
"It might have difficult if she'd been here to answer the charges, but President Norman made our task rather easier." It took him a moment to remember the Master's alias had a last name. "She's absconded to Earth. With the Doctor, and Mr. Turlough—Mr. Vislor Turlough, that is. I'm sorry we've no news of them yet."  
      
"Not your fault," Jack said. Stranded on Trion. It could be worse; Martha was safe, she'd said, and there hadn't been a ship in that hangar he couldn't fly. "Go on."  
      
"She's been deposed in absentia," Attris said.  
      
"Spend a day dead, and you miss all the fun. What about this slate system—who's in charge now?"  
      
"The Ministerium voted to temporarily confirm a reconfiguration of the slate. We'll be subject to a formal confirmation by plebiscite next month, but as of today, Kerl Arnam is interim president, and Enzellis Turlough— my boss; Malkon to his friends—is Trade Minister."  
      
"And springing me is at the top of your agenda; I'm honored."  
      
"You are of course free to leave Trion if you wish," she said. "The Trade Ministry will gladly pay your passage on the next ship to Earth, or wherever you choose. But we hope you will stay long enough to help us with one rather urgent problem."

.

They ran into Carbry—not, to Jack's great disappointment, in the cells, but in the lift. "Staying out of trouble?" said Jack. Carbry looked gave him a sidelong look, as though he wanted to shoot him again, but addressed Attris. "Do you know what I've been summoned up here for?"  
      
"To meet with the President," she said calmly.  
      
Carbry let out a put-upon sigh. "While those young fools in my office finish running the Agency into the ground, I suppose."  
      
"Not my department, sir."  
      
"Quite right," muttered Carbry. Attris's jaw set; Jack gave Carbry the look she was too polite to turn on him, but he stomped out of the lift ahead of them without seeing it.

The hall outside the President's office was full of clerical staff hauling file boxes in and out. Inside, every cabinet stood open, and one or two had been emptied entirely, their contents piled neatly alongside.

"Jack!" Martha sidestepped the stacked papers to sweep him up in a solid hug, letting him feel that she was in one piece. "Thank god you're all right."

"Indestructible, remember?"

She knew better, her look said. Someone cleared his throat from behind the desk—the crusty bigot from the garage portico. "President Arnam. Congratulations."

"Captain Harkness," he replied. "I apologize for your detainment. However, your presence here may prove fortuitous."

"So I hear. What's the trouble?"

"Carbry, this concerns you as well. Jasten!" A short youth with 'flunky' written all over him produced a construction diagram. "The previous administration sent up a network of orbital platforms—"

"We've heard," Jack said. "The lockout code is ninety thirty eighty-four nineteen."

"Yes, so the ladies have informed me." Martha bristled; Attris seemed used to it. "That passcode is itself locked out."

"From groundside," the flunky clarified. "Our engineers are hard at work on the problem."

"However," Arnam continued, "the problem goes beyond that. President Norman and her chief of staff left office without revealing any of her personal command codes— including the operational sequences for the platforms. Until those can be reconstructed—"

"Or worked around," the flunky added. "It's still possible."

"—we can neither shut the platforms down, nor can we use them, save by manually reprogramming them on-site, and that is a dangerous and time-consuming process."

"And where exactly do we come in?" Jack had a pretty good idea already.

"I am given to understand that you and Miss Jones—"

"—_Doctor _Jones," Jack corrected.

"—have a long acquaintance with Despina Norman. Even longer than yours, Agent Carbry," he said, "if not as close."

"We weren't sharing a lot of confidences," said Jack.

"Nevertheless. If we might presume upon your insight—loath as we are to resort to mere guesswork, the situation is critical." They all stood silently, Jack dropping into a slouch when he noticed his posture mirroring Carbry's. "Agent?" prompted Arnam.  
      
"I haven't got her bloody codes."  
      
"But you can surely speculate?"  
      
"Near-Trion space was not the Agency's concern." Carbry gave a put-upon sigh. "I assure you, I know nothing."  
      
Arnam's eyebrows lifted, wrinkling his fleshy pate. "I see. That is most unfortunate."  
      
"No doubt. Now, if you'll let me return to my work—"  
      
"Ah. You see, Agent Carbry—Mattias— if you truly do not possess that information—"  
      
"I don't, I tell you—"  
      
"—then your role within this administration becomes… rather superfluous, I'm afraid."  
      
Carbry whitened to his ears—in fury, not fear, for his next words were "I have given the Agency forty-five years of my life."  
      
"And we feel it's time for some new blood. Time to let some light in, eh?" Arnam paused to let that sink in; if Tractator hordes were the public face of the Agency, what would a good shakeup reveal? Jack thought of what he had found when he'd taken over Torchwood Three, and shuddered; Martha caught his eye and nodded.  
      
"Now," continued Arnam, "are you quite certain you have nothing to share? Nothing you've remembered."  
      
"Quite. Certain."  
      
"Then, I will have to ask you to schedule an exit interview with Mr. Jasten." He nodded, and the flunky scurried up to open the door for him.  "If you should recall anything in the meantime—" Carbry turned his back and stalked out the door.  
      
"Was that wise?" said Martha, when they'd gone. "If he does know the control codes…?"  
      
Arnam lifted a hand and stayed the flunky. "Mr. Jasten will of course ensure that Agent Carbry does not leave the city until that interview." Jasten bowed himself out. "Agent Carbry has spent his last thirty years on Earth, Miss Jones," he continued, in a tone that made Jack want to slap him, and he wasn't even the one being patronized. "He has no faction behind him. Even supposing he did mount a threat from the orbitals—which would take more knowledge than just the control codes—he would need ground-based support to follow it up. Lacking that, I don't know what sort of threat he could be to our administration."  
      
"Same kind the Master was?" muttered Martha, but softly enough that Arnam could affect not to hear.  
      
"I still say," volunteered Attris, after an awkward silence, "that we have no grounds for assuming her passcodes to be anything but random. Whatever her crimes, President Norman is no fool."  
      
"I'm not so sure," Jack said. "She has a pretty strong sense of the dramatic."  
      
"As I said, we are pursuing other solutions, but they will all take time." Arnam slid his chair to let Jasten, sidling back in, drop an armload of files into his desk drawer. "But you will share any insights you might have?"  
      
"I've got one," said Martha. "Shoot them down. Seems to me that solves all your problems."  
      
And it would, almost. "All but one," said Jack. "The Daleks are out there, rebuilding."  
      
"A long way away."  
      
"The Master's not. And she's got a ship. Who knows what she might come back with?"  
      
"And who knows what she might find here? A blasted wasteland?" She shook her head. "It's moot anyway; we don't know her codes and we don't know how she would have chosen them."  
      
Jack sighed. "She's right. We could guess for months, but the Doctor's the only man with that kind of insight."  
      
"Well." Arnam levered himself to his feet. "That is unfortunate. But it is certainly no fault of your own."  
      
"Great. Then, if you'll let us be on our way—"  
      
"You will be informed when transit to the Terra system becomes available."  
      
"Gonna be a while, huh?" said Jack.  
       
"I fear so. Miss Daine, if you would." He returned his complete attention to Jasten and his armload of specs.  
      
Attris shepherded them out through the bustling corridors. "So. Back to the cell?"  
      
Martha said nothing; her jaw and her shoulders were set. Attris marched them into the lift before answering. "I won't deny, Captain Harkness, that the President would like you kept away from the spaceport until legitimate transit is arranged."  
      
"We're a flight risk?"  
      
"Indeed. I'm afraid, like Agent Carbry, you are to be held in a loose house arrest for a short time. But as guests of our office, not prisoners." The lift spat them out in a sunlit foyer, looking out on the portico where they'd hidden the night of the escape. Three men waited inside the doors. They wore the omnipresent epauletted suits like costumes, their easy, erect posture at odds with the tailoring. "Trade Minister Enzellis Turlough has offered you the hospitality of Turlough Hall; his retainers will take you there."  
      
The oldest of the men nodded, oddly formal; Martha returned it.  
      
"Exiled to the provinces," said Jack, giving a half-hearted nod of his own. "Lovely."

  
      
~*~

      
The second day, the Doctor paced restlessly inside the door, listening for every movement from the guards. He pounded on the door at intervals, demanding to speak with Despina. The guards always returned with her regrets. The Doctor found this cheering, a sign that she had worse than them to deal with. Turlough would have found it more cheering if he'd seen any weakness in the guards' discipline, but they opened the door with blasters drawn, and nothing would bring them inside.

Late into ship's night, she sent for them at last. She received them in her salon, reclining like an odalisque on a Cyrrhenian divan. She was still in business clothes—on the vid to Trion all day, Turlough guessed-- but her customary black coat hung over a chair now; her pale gold shell bared her arms and throat. "My dear Doctor. I'm sorry my work has kept me from my duties as a host." She stretched out a hand, ungloved for once, bare even of rings; the Doctor did not bow over it. She arched her brows at the lapse. "And my dear Mr. Turlough, of course." She did not offer him her hand.  
      
"Trouble at home, Ms. Norman?" The Doctor flung himself onto the other couch and splayed his arms over its back, taking up as much space as he could.  "Must be getting pretty hot on Trion, if you've been too busy to gloat. Want to tell us about it? I love a good gossip."

Turlough gingerly took a seat, just inside the ambit of the Doctor's outstretched hand. He could feel the Doctor's gaze track Despina as she rose, and his whole body straining to follow. Turlough shrank instinctively from that exclusive focus, but the Doctor tightened his hand on the upholstery above Turlough's shoulder; and even curled his fingers into Turlough's jacket as Despina settled on the sofa's other arm.

By perfect, unspoken agreement, they'd made him their buffer zone. Damn all Time Lords, anyway.

Despina leaned on one elbow, her pose as deliberately insouciant as the Doctor's. "I think you're already quite aware of the situation on Trion, Doctor." Turlough could feel the Doctor's thrill of triumph; if his friends had been caught, she wouldn't forbear to tell them. "I had hoped you might have a tale for me."

"Really? Because you know most of my best ones." He traced the lines of embroidery in the seat cushions with one finger. "Have you told Turlough the one about the time you kept me in a doghouse for a year? I think he should hear that one."

"I believe Captain Harkness has told me the gist." His throat was tight around the words; he'd pictured a much less crude sort of humiliation.

Despina stroked his cheek with a manicured hand. "Now, Doctor, you've embarrassed him." Like that, in fact. "No, I fancy a tale of adventure. Something stirring.

"Tell me what happened in the Medusa Cascade."

Behind him, the coiled-spring tension of the Doctor's body snapped to  rigidity, so quickly Turlough was prepared for anything but an answer. "They had Davros, Despina."

"The Daleks' mastermind?" Turlough's arms pricked with gooseflesh.

Despina's eyes went wide. "Your other nemesis. I should be jealous."

The Doctor tutted. "You could look like that now, if you hadn't taken up body-snatching."

She brushed the barb away with a flutter of her hand. "Tell me everything, Doctor: what you found, how they returned."  

And the Doctor told the story— haltingly, bare of detail and emotion and largely even of names. But even the flat recitation of events had a horrific fascination: the near-human madness of the Dalek prophet; the almost selfless toil of Davros, sacrificing his own body to his creations; the twisted rationality of their final nihilistic vision.

Though there was no horror in Despina's fascination. She leaned in as the Doctor's voice fell lower and lower, her eyes wide and bright. "They brought a fleet through the Time Locks? They breached the Time War itself?"

"Not they. It. One lone Dalek—out of how many millions who might have tried last time." Turlough started; he'd not even known there had been another return.

"But it only needed one. They'd have taken care not to tamper with the known timeline." Her eyes were alight with calculation.

"Davros flew into the mouth of the Nightmare Child," the Doctor corrected, flatly. He leaned over Turlough's shoulder now, Despina's attention drawing him in. "We both remember that. Or you would, if you hadn't fled the battlefield."

"But the other dead remain dead; and you remain the sole witness. Acceptable damage," she mused. "If one more paradox in your head were a danger, the Reapers would have dogged your heels ever since Gallifrey fell."

"Reapers?" They both looked at Turlough as though they'd forgotten he was there.

"Elemental guardians of the timestream." Despina was the one to answer. "The Time Lords usurped their role long ago."

"He means that as long as the only evidence of the contradictory timelines is in my own memory, the universe works around the damage." The Doctor was grave. "The truth, now, is that Davros escaped that battle alive, to recreate the Dalek race after its destruction. If I remember differently—" he gestured incomprehensibly. "Well. Better my sanity than the Web of Time."

"Oh, I think the good Doctor exaggerates the dangers." Despina's fingers gripped the sofa's back, where the Doctor's had just lain. "We Time Lords are trained in such things. And even the lesser species can hold one or two paradoxes in mind without damage." Her other hand traced the line of Turlough's temple, finger gliding a bare inch from his skin. "Correct?"

Like his own memories of the Time Lords' war; Turlough swallowed, nodded.

"Though we are not trained," she continued, not quite dropping her hand, "in the arts of war; not in many generations. What of the Daleks in the Cascade, Doctor? Did you deploy the reality bomb against them?"

"Not quite." The Doctor scratched the back of his neck; in less than four days' acquaintance, Turlough had learned that tell as well as any of his own Doctor's. "Trip-stitch in the threshold manipulator—"

"And the blowback channeled into the Dalekanium power feeds?" Despina breathed in through parted lips. "Oh, but that's brilliant. Well done, Doctor."

The Doctor shied from her praise, ducking his head and rubbing his nape. "Might have been, yeah. Except we—" he swallowed the word, wet his lips and went on—"must have miscalculated the chronocline out of the time pocket. The blowback burnt itself out too early. They had a redoubt, somewhere beyond its reach. Or maybe another time pocket; I don't know."

  
With a flick of her hand, Despina dismissed all his words but one: "We?"

His breath caught. "I."  

"With no assistance? I _am _impressed."

"It was me. All..." He hesitated long enough that she had to have known he was lying. "All me. I set out to finish the genocide I started. And I failed."

Turlough wondered whom he was protecting; and whether it was their complicity, or their failure, that he was so desperate to keep from her. But to his surprise, Despina did not press; rather, she drew back to back her full height and beamed in triumph.

"What a delicious irony. The Doctor apologizes—for sparing his enemies." She smiled beatifically. "When we were younger, you'd have called that mercy before admitting the failure; or admitting mercy to be a failing." She slid to her knees at the Doctor's feet, sweeping Turlough's legs out of her way imperiously; there was nothing submissive in the posture. "And irony crowned with irony-- to think how those mindless automata have managed what you've been too cowardly to attempt."

The Doctor fell back against the cushions, cornered and pale. "They only succeeded _because _they're mindless!" His voice seemed to flail, as his penned-in limbs could not. "Simple enough to press on through, through total madness! And even then, the odds—"

"—were with them." She raised expectant brows.

"You can't grow the Time Lord race back from a single cell!" The Doctor's fingers dug into the upholstery; a single stitch gave, with a loud report. "Gallifrey is gone. It's gone, and I killed it, and you can't bring it back." He pounded one fist on the sofa, not even noticing Turlough's coattail caught beneath it. "And this nostalgia's not like you," he muttered. "You could never see the back of the place soon enough."

He really didn't listen to himself, Turlough thought; and yet he still bristled when Despina laughed.

"Oh, Doctor, you're one to talk. You really are more devoted to your own contrarianism than to anything else.

"Nostalgia." She drew the word out. "The pain of homecoming. It's never been _my_ weakness, Doctor. I still dream of coming home in triumph—the resurrector; the great savior, ready to take on the mantle of a Gallifreyan empire. But you! Oh, it must give you pain, to think of returning to the home you failed to save, failed even to avenge." She rested a hand on the sofa arm and stretched up into the Doctor's space.

"It won't work, and you know it," he said, flatly. He was looking somewhere over her shoulder: not at her eyes; not at her throat, or her bosom, or her long white arms. "Whatever scheme you have in mind. It won't work, it won't preserve the Web, and I won't let you use me or my TARDIS. You can count me out."

Despina made an exaggerated moue. "You haven't even heard what I intend yet."

She rose smoothly to her feet and took loose hold of his necktie. Turlough darted his eyes toward the cabin door.

"We're the only two left, you know," she continued. "Some might say we have a duty to propagate the species."

The Doctor shook his head, nonplussed. "That body's not even Gallifreyan, Despina." But he said it to the wall opposite.

"Hybrid vigor, then. Isn't that one of your secrets, Doctor?" She laid a bare hand possessively over his knee; Turlough suddenly could not remember whether he had ever before seen her without her gloves. "I should like to see you surrounded by our children. I'd build a kitchen, just for you—would you like that? A little cottage on Earth?" She wrenched his chin over, not gently, until he met her gaze. "I asked you a question, Doctor."

"And you know the answer."

"Oh, but I'm not done asking. Stay with me, Doctor, let me _keep_ you, and I'll call the Tractators off Earth. I'll put a fence around it, keep it all blue and lovely, just for you. Your own private island, just you and however many humans you want as pets."

"And will you stand down the Trion rail guns?" said the Doctor levelly, though his breath was shallow. "Send the Tractators back into hibernation, abandon the Despex experiments?" He jerked his head free. "Cease this senseless war on the universe?" And there his voice cracked at last; Turlough had to plant his feet to stop himself shrinking away from the sound.

Despina planted a slender hand to either side of the Doctor's shoulders. "Stop my war, Doctor?" She threw her head back and laughed; and this time the Doctor stared up at the long white line of her throat. "How else am I to win spoils to lay at your feet?" The Doctor said nothing. "To give you gifts?" she spat. "Tokens of my profound esteem?"

"Stop it. Just stop it."

"Surely you wouldn't _whore yourself out_ for less than a few star systems, would you, Doctor?" She lit on the arm of the sofa, hands flanking his neck in a parody of feminine seduction. "Or would you—you thought your own charms were enough to keep me kept. Do you even remember me as fondly as you remember yourself?" She turned his head this way and that, watching his eyes track back to hers. "Or is that even possible?"

The Doctor seized her wrist, but did not move her hand. "I would have cared for you," he rasped.

"As you always have?" She caressed his cheek, leaned in close to his ear. "I'd sooner die. Oh, wait!"

The Doctor surged to his feet, mouth twisted in rage. Despina swayed, suddenly overbalanced, and he let go her wrist; she pulled him down as she fell.

And then they were struggling in earnest. Turlough drew back, not out of sight, but far from either Time Lord's attention. Despina's guards rushed in, but only a few paces; the rage was real enough, on both sides—but so was the rest of it. She got hold of the Doctor's hands, one and then the other, and held them bruisingly tight, but she could not throw him off; he rolled them over, stretched his own arms high above her head, and her arms were pinned by her own grasp on him.

"Twelve regenerations," he panted. "A new life—the one thing you've wanted, for centuries. Was it worth it?" His voice was thick. "Just to spite me, was it worth it?" She struggled to throw off his weight from her hips, her legs, but she did not let go; Turlough saw blood well at the Doctor's wrist, under her lacquered nail. "Or has it been so long since you were a proper Time Lord that you just couldn't cope?" he hissed. "What that must have been like, getting it all back—the wheel of the universe, the web of time; feeling the potential of history in your fingertips..." Her victorious grin had frozen into a rictus. "It was too much for you."

"It was the drums," she pleaded. "The drums, in my head."

Almost to himself, the Doctor said, "No wonder you burned so many lives so fast. But it never helped, did it?" She shook her head silently, teeth still bared, hands still clenched. "That drumbeat—it's Time, Master! Even we can't escape it," he choked. "Even we die. All of us. Everything has its time." His face twisted in pain, inches from her own. "Everything dies."

He shook his head, blindly, shoulders heaving; and she caught a shaking breath and lifted her face until her forehead pressed against his. "Guards," she gasped. "Show Mr. Turlough to his quarters."

The Doctor brought one trembling hand down to her shoulder. He didn't look away from her eyes as the guards led Turlough out the door.


	19. Chapter 19

Colonel Mace detailed ten men to Paris, plus a Torchwood liaison, to join up with French UNIT forces on arrival. Sergeant Patel was in command-- "Unless, of course, you wish to take charge of the operation, Sir Alastair?"  
      
"I'll stay at HQ, if it's all the same," Sir Alastair demurred. "Ms. Norman's lawyers have been getting rather fractious. And I suppose you," he said to Sarah Jane, "will need someone to look after that—" he gestured as if searching for a word—"_house_ of yours."

"Luke can take care of the place, and himself.” She smiled innocently. The Brigadier's curiosity over the contents of her attic would have been worrisome, coming from anyone else.

"He's fifteen," Sir Alastair harrumphed. Long retired from teaching, he still found it impossible to trust teenage boys to do anything right.

“Though,” Sarah added, “if you wanted to post a guard on the TARDIS... maybe even look in on it yourself..." If the TARDIS drew trouble— or if trouble followed the Doctor— it wouldn't hurt to have an adult around the place.

"Consider it done." __

_._

_Consider it done_ was clearly the byword of the day; they flew for Paris mere hours later, and the intervening time was a rush out of which only a few moments stood clearly.  
      
At HQ: "The good news," said Harry, "is that the Despex blood test is nearly instant, naked-eye readable, and practically foolproof. Perfect for you, Sarah."  
      
"Gee, thanks."  
      
"Um. Not quite how I meant that. But, here, look, the pipettes have been lined with a clotting factor that will activate in the presence of the monofilament breakdown products. The greater the clotting, the greater the contamination. Easy as pie."  
      
"Harry, that's marvelous! What's the bad news?"  
      
"I'm afraid we've still not found a way to flush the Despex beads from the system. We are working! Laura's been a real trouper."  
      
Sarah distributed pipettes, single-use needles, and labels among several pockets and her handbag. "But in the meantime, once we know someone's been exposed to Despex programming, we have no way of freeing them."  
      
Harry shrugged. "At least you'll know."

      
At home: "But I've never been to Paris."  
      
"It's. A fashion. Show. Why would you want to go?"  
      
"I wear clothes."  
      
Sarah had the only fifteen-year-old on Earth who had never learned that there were some things—that there was anything—he shouldn't be interested in. She gave her boots one final shake out the kitchen door and smiled.  
      
"Besides," Luke continued, "you like looking at models in magazines. Why aren't you interested in looking at the same women in person?"

Clyde's face was a picture of enlightenment. Oh, boys. Sarah tousled Luke's hair on her way back up the stairs. "Sorry, Luke. But these aliens are just too dangerous. I don't want to face them without UNIT behind me."  
      
"Well, if you need more backup—" Clyde and Luke followed her back up to her room, where Rani was frowning deeply at everything in her suitcase.

"Shouldn't you try to be a little more fashion-forward, though? You know, just to blend in?" she said. "Maybe I should come along as your consultant. Personal shopper?"  
      
"Nice try. Seven out of ten. I'll send you all postcards." Sarah tossed her boots in and zipped the bag. "Right, I'm off. Don't antagonize Sir Alastair!"

      
In limbo: "I do feel a bit guilty, though," she said an hour later, to Mickey, waiting on the tarmac at UNIT's airfield. "For running off again after barely a week at home. I forget, sometimes, how little Luke's actually seen of this world. Maybe I ought to take him to Paris this summer—just for a holiday."  
      
"You're welcome to it," Mickey snorted. "You couldn't pay me enough to go back there."  
      
"You do know our version doesn't have Cybermen."  
      
"Still fucking Paris, man. If I never see it again, it'll be too soon."  
      
"You didn't ask him about Paris, did you?" Ianto Jones glided up beside Mickey, garment bag over his shoulder, and handed him the keys to the SUV. Mickey silently exchanged them for one of his guns; Ianto strapped the holster on beneath his impeccable suit jacket.

"Ms. Smith—" She gave him a stern look. "--Sarah Jane. I've reviewed the pre-publicity, and made note of all Despex's and Charles Bernhardt's scheduled appearances. We will need invitations to the main runway show—I've managed to obtain one, and a press pass for you, but that's not a lot of firepower. But we ought to be able to get to Bernhardt himself at the reception at the flagship shop, and for that we only need to be well-dressed enough to get past the bouncer."  
      
"Only," said Sarah, wishing for a moment she'd brought Rani after all.  
      
"No, you'll do fine," he said absently, flipping through the publicity folder. "At least—you did pack those boots?"  
      
Mickey looked over Ianto's shoulder at the teaser photos. Frankly uninspired photography, Sarah though, stealing a glance: typical wispy women goose-stepping with their shoulders thrown back.

"See, that's why you'd rather have him along anyway," said Mickey. "Everything on that runway would look like an alien to me."  
      
      
And then flight, which Sarah always found more unsettling at such short distances—all up or down, with no time in the middle to just be in transit. And then dawn in Paris, with thirty-six hours to find the Tractators before the show.  
      
Colonel Carnot and the French UNIT forces had got a head start on the search—though not, as Carnot explained, a terribly useful one. "There is as much of Paris below the ground as above," Carnot said. "There are the catacombs, the sewers, the Métro, the cellars and sub-cellars of the private buildings, even various natural caverns; and one may follow a vibration signature, or even a trailing electrical cable, into any of these, and find only an exclusive nightclub, or a coffeehouse or a cinema. Last evening my men discovered an underground planetarium."  
      
"Analog projector." Ianto flipped through a dossier of the previous day's photographs. "Most likely second-hand."  
      
"Who would build an underground planetarium?" wondered Sergeant Patel.  
      
Carnot shrugged. "Mithraists, perhaps? But not aliens. Beneath the epicenters of your vibrational signature, we found some new excavation, much like that described at the factory sites. But no sign of use or occupation—tunnels, only."  
      
He sounded unaccountably grim. "But surely that's good," said Sarah. "Where did the tunnels lead?"  
      
"Between one cellar and another," said Carnot. "And out to the sewer on one side, and the Métro service passages on the other. It is all connected, you see. With a good map and a set of picklocks, these Tractators might be based anywhere beneath the city."  
      
Sarah crumpled. "And they might strike anywhere else."

.

She followed the underground search through Sergeant Patel's increasingly frustrated texts, as _FORCED DOOR @ SPELUNKING CLUB HQ UNDER WORKSHOP _was followed by _SPELUNKERS DID IT,_ and_ OMG THOUSANDS OF BONES. WALLS OF THEM_ by _COLONEL SAYS MONKS DID THAT. MUST HAVE BEEN SOME CRAZY BORED MONKS._ As inconclusive as the underground teams' reports were—no equipment cache or communications panels; no sign of where the Tractators were hidden, or where they might emerge—the Sergeant's texts soon became the high point of her own day.

Hers started well enough. She and Ianto accompanied Carnot's adjutant, a puppy-faced young man named Laplace, around the Despex Paris sites to administer blood tests. Anna Germain, the head of the Paris division, was as cooperative as they might have wished, and gave them full access to the offices, warehouses, shops, and atelier.

Which altogether employed upwards of six hundred full-time employees. Harry had been able to provide enough clotting factor for no more than three hundred tests.

The triage seemed simple enough to Sarah Jane, and she said so: "We'd like to test managerial staff for each department." She scrambled to come up with a justification that didn't involve describing Addison's communications console, but Germain asked for none, only nodded and made a note. Heartened, Sarah continued,  "And then the people who have the most contact with the fabric itself: the sales associates at the shops—" another nod, another note—"and then the couturiers and seamstresses at the atelier, and the models who work with them."

Mme. Germain laid down her pen. "I am afraid I have no authority to arrange that, Ms. Smith. You see, our models do not work in-house; you will need to arrange for them to report to testing through their agencies."

Agencies, plural. Sarah shared a look at Ianto, who gamely drew out his mobile. "May we have a list of the agencies you contract with, and access to your employment records?"

Germain shrugged. "If you wish, but I must caution you, until the end of Fashion Week, you may have great difficulty finding these women, anywhere except upon the runway. Their time is in great demand, you see."

"I do see," said Sarah. "And the garment workers?"

"Again, they are in the large part contractors. We at Despex have always prided ourselves, you see, on providing opportunities for the young designers and couturiers. It is a partnership system, of our own innovation; in exchange for exclusive rights to our sponsored designs, we provide the facilities and the publicity—"

"In short, they're not actually your employees and you can't compel them to do anything."

Germain spread her hands. "I am glad you understand the difficulty, Ms. Smith."

"I understand perfectly." She forced herself to smile and let Germain show them to the conference room where the management staff was gathering to be tested. En route, she whispered to Laplace, "Who can compel the couturiers? And the models? I know they're all too busy this week to turn out voluntarily even for a full-scale hazmat incident, let alone a suspicion of contamination, but there must be some way."

Laplace frowned. "We would have to go through the Minister of Health. It will probably take more time than we have." He flipped open his mobile, dubiously, and began placing calls.

He was on the phone all day, while Sarah and Ianto tested two hundred office workers and shopgirls without finding more than the barest traces of Despex. They were turned away from the doors of the atelier—and from the windows, and even the ubiquitous cellar tunnel—and by evening, all Laplace's calls to the Minister's staff had still failed to gain them access, or to get them any closer to compulsory testing.

"Right," said Sarah at dinner—a very good dinner; at least tracking aliens in Paris had some compensations. "There's still the reception at the shop. Bernhardt and most of these young designers will be there, and their models. All we have to do is get close enough to scratch them."

Ianto lowered his fork and raised his eyebrows, but all he said was, "It's a pity Jack's not here."

.

And it was a pity, Sarah Jane reflected, later that night. Much as it pained her to admit, Jack would probably have sweet-talked everyone at the party into giving up some blood. At the very least, he probably wouldn't have ended up stashed in a fitting room with a paltry three samples, all negative.

The door opened, and one of the bouncers shoved Ianto in. Two more men followed: a harried-looking youth in outlandish dress and a Byronic blond in a surprisingly conservative suit. Sarah recognized the second from the photographs in his interview. "Mr. Bernhardt. I'm sorry, there seems to have been some terrible mistake."

The other man answered for him. "Oh, so you did not intend to come in and jab three of our designers with needles? This man only collected their blood by accident?"

Sarah smiled as innocently as she knew how. "Rather, I made a mistake. In not coming to you immediately, Mr. Bernhardt—" the blond was stony-faced—"and explaining. You see, I'm a journalist—"

That finally got a reaction out of Bernhardt. "For which paper?"

"Freelance, I'm afraid. But I've been doing an investigative piece, cooperating with UNIT in their investigation of these Despex deaths..." She gave the briefest explanation she could—Despex infiltrated the nervous system and caused bizarre behavioral symptoms; there was a test for it; where else should she look for contamination than among the people who had made Despex their livelihood? Ianto positioned himself at her shoulder, mirroring the harried man's body language, and produced test vials at illustrative moments—from where, she had no idea; he was wearing the tightest trousers she'd seen since the seventies, tighter than she had thought men's suiting could get.

Bernhardt's assistant rolled his eyes throughout. Bernhardt himself listened impassively until the pipettes appeared. "Very well," he said, and rolled up his sleeve. "Test me."

Ianto blinked. The assistant rattled off a stream of French too fast and colloquial for Sarah to follow. "No, no," said Bernhardt, in English, "let us allay their fears. I have every confidence in the safety of Despex." He extended his arm. "Test me, and if you find that my blood is contaminated, I will personally help you to take the blood of every one of my people here tonight."

"Well." Sarah ripped open a sterile lancet, knowing she had completely lost control of the proceedings. "That's very gracious of you, Mr. Bernhardt."

His blood welled into the pipette. It rolled down the sides, smearing and dissolving the dust of Harry's test factor, and it didn't clot. And didn't clot, and stubbornly didn't clot: Bernhardt was completely clean.

"You see?" he said, rolling his sleeve back down. "Every confidence. But, you are still skeptical."

"I'm afraid I am."

"Then give me a chance to—evangelize to you, as it were. Rene—" he ducked his head and had a brief, whispered exchange with his assistant. Rene looked mutinous, but he reached into a pocket and produced two slips of cardstock. Bernhardt offered on his open palm: invitations to the runway show.

"Come tomorrow and see what we've done at Despex. You will be impressed; I have no doubt."

They took the tickets. Rene, his mouth pressed very thin, escorted them to the door. It wasn't quite being thrown out—just asked to leave, politely—but one of the bouncers followed, in case the point wasn't clear.

"I don't suppose you'd care to be tested?" Sarah ventured.

Rene snorted. "I am a businessman, not a tailor." He deposited them on the sidewalk, outside the velvet rope. "I've barely touched the stuff myself; I never wear artificial fibers."

"Then you might invest in an iron," muttered Ianto to his retreating back.

Sarah Jane slumped against the cool display window; she could feel it shuddering with the music from inside. "Well. That was a fiasco."

Ianto fanned the runway tickets and tucked them into a pocket she would have sworn was painted on. "At least we can get some backup into the show tomorrow."

She laughed; there was nothing else to do. "At least. But what now? They'll be searching the underground all night, but we're hardly dressed for that." She wasn't sure just what they _were _dressed for. Ianto was turned out—immaculately, she supposed, by the standards of the party they'd left— in a plum-colored shirt that had to have cost more than Sarah's entire outfit. And, she rather thought, lip gloss. Eyeliner, certainly. She frowned down at her own clothes; Ianto had blessed the boots without reservation, at least—

Before she could finish the thought, he had stepped into her space. He tweaked her collar, tugged efficiently at her blouse, did something clever with her scarf, and offered her his arm before Sarah could get a proper look at what he'd done. "Nope," he agreed. "We're dressed for a party. So let's find one."

It was Fashion Week, after all. Other velvet ropes were strung up along the Avenue Montaigne, and Chanel had taken over one of the hotels. "I suppose we might run into a model or one of those contract designers anywhere," she temporized. "Oh, what the hell. Let's go."

They followed the pulse of music down the street; any Tractators excavating tonight would have plenty of cover. Sarah peered after her reflection in shop windows, still feeling underdressed, wondering if she needed to touch up her lipstick. Wondering if Ianto's wouldn't actually be a better color, but not quite daring to ask him for it.

But it must have all passed muster; the bouncers let them in without a challenge to the Chanel party. "All right," said Sarah. "Time to fall back on the first rule of journalism."

Ianto cocked an eyebrow in query.

"Stay close to the bar," Sarah explained. "You with me?"


	20. Chapter 20

Turlough waited up for the Doctor in the dark. Easier to feign sleep, if he slunk in ashamed—or worse, jubilant. Dangerous to actually sleep, of course, even if he could; there was always the chance the Doctor would find some opportunity to gain the upper hand—take Despina as a hostage, incapacitate her. Leave her sleeping.  
      
And there was no escaping that image, however he paced the little stateroom. The Doctor and the Master. When had they last been together? After his time—or during, there was a thought.  
      
But, no—there had been that year of captivity. Despina had surely known the Doctor in this body; known him twice over, if poor Lucy Saxon had ever…  
      
Turlough forced his fists to open, took a deep breath, and sank onto the one bed. He'd been a soldier once, if not a very good one; surely he could still doze on cue if he needed, consign all this to dreams he could forget. And he really shouldn't sleep in his clothes; while Despina shared the contents of the galley freely enough, she kept no male clothing aboard but the guards' uniforms. He'd want his suit unwrinkled, for whatever psychological advantage it could give him. But he undressed with increasing reluctance, smoothing and folding his jacket many times before hanging it in the wardrobe, until finally he found himself hunched on the bed in shirt and smallclothes, arms around his knees, hiding from unseen eyes.  
      
Schoolboy habits, Despina had told him, were the hardest to break. Even the Doctor had not broken Turlough of this one, though it had been years since he had felt so exposed, even in a dark room, even alone.  
      
Schooling. He'd taken one lesson from his detainment, one that he'd been glad of at Brendon: that after choosing the manner and method of his own debasement, nothing inflicted from outside quite compared.      
      
The Master had learned that one early, he was certain—the gloves, the high collars, the poise, it all fit. Fit, too, with what the Doctor had said about Gallifreyan schooling. Turlough had had no lack of offers, on Less Trion, to tend his striped burns—had accepted one or two. Several. Had the Doctor put the Master back together, when he couldn't stop their fellows from tormenting him? Turlough thought so. They had that in common, then, the Master and he.  
      
He wondered who had put the Doctor back together.  
      
Turlough lay down dressed as he was, rubbing his sleeve against his brand and for once not berating himself for needing that comfort. And woke, surprised he could still sleep under fire—metaphorically, at least—to noise in the corridor.  
      
The door opened; he tensed, but in the dark they didn't even see him—Despina, her guards, and the Doctor.  
      
His shirt hung open, and his tie trailed from his pocket. His hands were cuffed in front. They shook, so slightly Turlough would never have seen it if not for the glint of light on the chain between them; the same slanting light showed him hard under his trousers.  
      
Despina leaned against the doorframe, the Doctor's suit coat draped over her arm. She was swathed in a robe, black satin heavily embroidered in gold; nothing showed under it except her tall black boots.  
      
So much for the Doctor getting the upper hand.  
      
Despina's lips curved in a perfect archaic smile. "Is this the part where I thank you for a lovely evening?" She drew the Doctor's hands in by the glittering chain, until they rested above her heart. "You see, Doctor, I do still have a few things to learn about living in this body." She laughed, abandoned, unmistakably the Master.  
      
The Doctor's hands, where they lay, might have spanned her neck, if not for the guards at his sides, at her shoulders. They curled instead, not quite into fists. "Despina. Master. Please, don't make me stop you." His voice was rough.  
      
She stepped lightly back. "I've never made you do anything, Doctor." She shook out the Doctor's jacket. "You'll find the key in the inside breast pocket." And then she looked straight at Turlough, finding his eyes unerringly, and tossed the coat through the door. And palmed it shut.  
      
In starlight and running lights, the Doctor's face was a blank, glimmering in and out of sight as he groped for his coat, rooted in the pocket. "Here." Turlough turned up the reading lamp. "Bring that into the light."  
      
The Doctor started. Turlough couldn't tell guilt from shame on his face anymore, couldn't have said which he was seeing, under the arousal and the anger. But he offered Turlough the coat like an apology, and sat gingerly on the edge of the bed, breathing hard, while Turlough turned out pocket after pocket—all nearly empty, after Carbry's search—and found the key.  
      
The Doctor reached for it. "Right, I can just—"  
      
"Don't be absurd." He took the Doctor's hands; they lay between his, motionless, but now Turlough could feel the Doctor's body thrumming with the effort of keeping them still. "Let me." One manacle snapped open—the Doctor reached again for the key, Turlough fumbled it, and the Doctor caught it from his hand, applied it to his other cuff. His eyes darted, anywhere but on Turlough's face.  
      
"Doctor." Turlough caught his hand as he freed it, took the cuffs and the key away and shoved them into the Doctor's coat. He laid one hand on the Doctor's thigh. "Let me help."  
      
The Doctor's face was colorless even to the eyes, huge pupils rimmed in staring white. Turlough had made the offer unthinking, jealousy flashing into sympathy like the faces of a spun coin, but it had struck close to something very raw—what had she done to him? "Or lie awake like this and brood all night, if that's really what you'd prefer." He didn't move his hand, only pressed it, just hard enough to feel a syncopated pulse through the cheap synthetic.  
      
The Doctor let out a held breath, only a little shakily. "Turlough—"  
      
"I don't recommend brooding, myself." He did slide his hand up then, slowly, just an inch or so; and gasping through bared teeth, the Doctor seized his shoulders and pulled them both down, side by side, onto the bed.  
      
He buried his face against Turlough's shoulder, breathed into his neck—not kissing, or biting, but just pressing with cheek and chin and taking great shallow breaths of his scent—while Turlough got his trousers down. And his own shorts, though that was easier; he wasn't even hard yet. And then he was, his body catching up all at once, when he got his hand around both of them.    
      
From there it was fast, messy, and desperate. The Doctor clutched him wherever his hands came to rest—one in Turlough's shirt, one on his hip—and kissed his neck, striving for mutuality, or else to wash Despina's taste out of his mouth. Turlough had thought he would babble, but instead he was almost silent, not even moaning as his own Doctor would have.  Turlough thought for a moment of how easy it would be, after years of thinking of the Doctor with strangers, to think of him as a stranger now, this man in this new body that he had never touched. The Doctor's cock leapt against his palm, and Turlough was sure that to the Doctor, he himself might be a stranger now, might be anyone. But it didn't matter— or rather, it was good, so good, for once, to not be the one who needed; to hold the Doctor in his hands while he came apart, and to put him back together.

The Doctor came curled in on himself, back bowed and brow pressed tight to Turlough's shoulder. He lay there getting his breath back a long time, while Turlough stroked him through his last spasms. He didn't chase down his own orgasm, though the sudden slickness between them made him lean wantonly into his own hand. But it was just as voluptuous to gather up the Doctor's angular body, to feel the Doctor subside against him with every inch of skin awake and hungry for the touch.

The Doctor was taller than he was now, even when Turlough didn't slouch. Skinnier than his Doctor ever was, all knees and elbows. His chin was stubbled, coarser than it used to be; and his hair was coarser, standing on end, not falling through his fingers like his Doctor's had. His face, when he rolled over in Turlough's arms, was melancholy, not smugly pleased. But he colored and swallowed when his gaze crossed Turlough's, and in that moment he was no different, no different at all.

Turlough laid his head between the Doctor's hearts. "Are you all right?"

Silent laughter. "Not quite so old as that, yet."

"No, I mean— did she—" there was no way to ask that didn't sound hopelessly dramatic. "Hurt you?" he finished, helplessly.

The Doctor's breath caught, then deliberately released. Not as such, Turlough thought, assuming it was all the answer he'd get. But the Doctor spread a hand over Turlough's hair—keeping his eyes down, Turlough realized, even while he leaned up into the caress—and said, "When he got the cuffs on me, I thought... thought it was all up to him, after that. But he wouldn't—unless I would— Well." He sighed, long, until it trailed into a dismissive snort. "Doesn't matter. You wouldn't..."

"Wouldn't what?" He jerked his head away from the Doctor's petting. "Wouldn't understand?" The Doctor set his jaw in another tell Turlough had picked right up on—waiting for Turlough to challenge what he'd said. Turlough rolled his eyes; there was no way to even argue with the man without playing along with him. "Wishing they'd just rape you outright," he said, more acidly than he'd meant to, "because the alternatives all make you complicit? No, I don't suppose I'd understand anything about that."

That hit home; a muscle jumped at the Doctor's temple like an unseen slap. He hadn't put it to himself that way, Turlough realized, and ducked his head to look away. "Sorry. I always seem to lash out at you—"

"No—no, it's true. I deserved that." But his shoulders fell back against the mattress.

"Maybe that," Turlough agreed. "Not the rest."

The Doctor didn't answer, or try to meet his eyes, but he reached out, slid one hand under the trailing fronts of Turlough's shirt to trace loops and curlicues over his chest, skirting his nipples. Just the right speed, just the right pressure—Turlough's cock jumped against the Doctor's hip. He pressed into that touch, and into the Doctor's hand, turning his face up. The Doctor shifted, to let him thrust against his belly, but spared no attention for his mouth or throat.

Turlough smiled, perhaps a little nastily, and reached up to trace the Doctor's lips. They were bitten and red. "Don't you like kissing," he said, "in this body?"

It wasn't a challenge, not quite. Turlough did like kissing, and would have demanded it, for whatever meaningless comfort it would give, if this had been a stranger he'd taken to bed. But this Doctor was no stranger, and nothing they did would be meaningless.

"I like it fine." He took the hint and kissed Turlough, deliberately, as though trying to remember, not how to kiss, but how _they_ had kissed.

Turlough drew away. "It's all right, Doctor," he whispered against his lips. Kissed him again, hard and carnal. "I'm not the same man, either."

And he wasn't. The youth he'd been would not have held the Doctor's head to worry his bruised mouth; would not have borne the Doctor's hand straying to the edges of his brand as he peeled away his shirt—and, when a touch there made him shiver, that youth would have blushed, not shut his eyes to follow the shudder over his body, down to his cock in the Doctor's tightening hand.

"Pity we're not set up for anything—complicated," the Doctor murmured. "'Cause I'd love to feel what you can do with this."

Turlough's hips snapped; he wanted that too, to wrap himself in the Doctor's long legs, fuck him as slowly as he might, oh, slower than he could even think of now—

He bore the Doctor back down against the bunk and settled between the high arches of his hipbones. The Doctor's cock dragged wetly over his thigh, rising again to meet him—lovely dual vascular system! "Oh, I think we're set up to do rather a lot." He rocked them together, cock sliding against cock in shallow thrusts, first teasing, and then almost too intense to bear. The Doctor stretched beneath him and let his head fall back, as lazy and open as he had been closed up before. Oh, Turlough wanted to fuck him, wanted his cock in his mouth, wanted to learn the new shape of him, inside and out, to touch every inch of his new skin. Wanted to hold back the climax he felt building, as long as he could—to savor the Doctor's greedy hands against his back, his long satisfied "ohh" as Turlough licked a stripe up his throat and his sudden silence when Turlough closed his teeth.

But there was no holding back, not now. Turlough pressed his forehead against the Doctor's; breathed his breath, more intimate than a kiss; and let the stutter of skin, catching and scraping and suddenly, shockingly slick, carry him off. The Doctor held him hard, shoulder and hip, while he gasped and panted through it: gone, transported by his own orgasm, clinging tight as though Turlough's body was all that kept him from sinking.  
    

~*~

They were four hours on the road to Turlough Hall. Their driver, Amyand, and his men introduced themselves as sarns, which meant retainers of the other Turlough brother in some feudal and highly specific way that Jack didn't care to untangle.  
      
Or need to, with Martha along to ask the questions. "This Malkon's the elder brother, then?" she said.  
      
"No." Amyand didn't take his eyes off the road, though it was admirably straight and flat. "Vislor is the Turlough of Turlough. Malkon's the younger by more than a decade, though he doesn't look it."  
      
"Time travel'll do that to you," said Jack. "So how come he gets the retinue, if he's not _the _Turlough?"  
      
The other sarns exchanged a glance, but deferred to Amyand. "He was our people's leader on Sarn," Amyand said, and Jack mentally capitalized the word. "Our Chosen One." There were capitals on that, too, and a surprising bitterness.  
      
"And here?" said Martha. "What is he here?"  
      
"Legally? Our patron and sponsor." Road whirred by, and the architectural detritus of the capital: a freight yard on one side, a disused quarry on the other.  
      
"And extra-legally?" said Jack.  
      
"Still the Chosen One," offered one of the retainers, from the back

"And the Trions are the ones who chose him," said Amyand, in what was clearly an ongoing argument. He addressed himself to Jack and Martha again, still without lifting his eyes from the road. "Our choice, living here," he said, "is between being poor and backward Trions, or being Sarns. But we're pretty poor and backward by our own people's standards now—we came away from Sarn with nothing but the clothes on our backs and the knowledge in our heads.

"So we stay loyal to Malkon, to the Chosen One, because it's one of the only traditions we _can_ keep. And—" he pitched his voice for the retainer in the back seat—" because it's better to follow our old leader—who's a good man, don't mistake me—than to follow the old religion, that the Doctor proved years ago was founded on lies."    
      
Martha snapped to attention. "You know the Doctor?"  
      
"You knew he had to come into it somewhere," said Jack.  
      
They got the whole story then, about the volcanic holocaust of the Trions' prison planet, where Amyand had been born, and Malkon had been exiled, and where the Doctor and Turlough—the elder Turlough—had come in pursuit of the Master. "I hear he's been the president all this time," said Amyand. "Woman's body and everything. That's quite a trick."

"It's no trick," said Jack. "We've met her—she's him." Martha furrowed her brow at the pronouns, but didn't offer a correction.

"They say the Doctor's got a new face, too," said Amyand. "I'd like to see that, before he takes off again."

Jack and Martha shared a glance. "He already has," said Martha. "The Master took him away, to Earth."

"He'll be back," said Amyand, with the perfect assurance Jack had been striving for ever since waking up alone in a Trion cell.  

"That's an impressive show of faith, from a man professing the virtues of freethinking not two minutes ago."  

Amyand finally flicked his eyes up from the almost-deserted highway; Jack sensed he had offended rather deeply. "Faith doesn't enter into it," Amyand said flatly. "What language do you think you're speaking now?"

Even if that wasn't a metaphor, Jack had to think about his answer. "English." It was what he would default to with Martha there.

Amyand nodded. "Back at the capital, with the suits around, I heard you in Trion. Right now, with just us, I hear Sarn.

"And when the Doctor and the Master came to my planet, they spoke Sarn, and very well too. So did the Turlough—and none of them had ever been to the place, right?

"And Turlough leaves with us; and then three, four days out, the ship to Trion reaches the turnaround point—commits to making port at Great Trion. And next morning Turlough comes in to breakfast and starts speaking Trion.

"And then he tries the Dialect, that the rustics all speak in his district; and then he tries Earth languages. Four, five languages—all gibberish to me, then, but all there in his head. But the Sarn—which he couldn't have ever learned to begin with, when you think about it—that was gone. He had to learn it over from nothing, like a child; and he still speaks it with this heavy Trion accent.

"You're speaking to me in perfect Sarn." He let that sink in, while farmland rolled by on either side, red-lit in the last sunlight. "The Doctor's not out of this yet."   

  
That was as much as any of the Sarns had to say about the Doctor—or, to Jack's surprise, about the Master; they were largely of the opinion that dealing with pan-Trion politics was what they had a liege-lord for. Having seen something of pan-Trion politics, Jack was inclined to agree.

Their liege-lord, meanwhile, kept the militia at an impressive standard. From the roof terrace of Turlough Hall, you could see the drill-grounds, which fronted on the Turlough's parkland; Jack drifted up there his second day at the hall to watch the maneuvers. The locals were well-trained and very impressively equipped: an ugly little society, Trion, but they saved all their design sense for weaponry. The militia boasted some beautifully mobile light field artillery, and even a small flight of surface-to-space darts, with wing-mounted plasma strafers Jack was just aching to get a good look at.

"Must have cost a pretty penny."

"The capitol sends some funds." Sarasta, the Sarn woman Amyand had detailed to keep tabs on them, emerged from the stair, shaking out her waist-length silver curls as the breeze caught them. "The rest is levied locally. Men can waive the tax if they serve, so there's never a shortage of volunteers."

Martha followed her out onto the terrace. "Do women ever serve?"

"There were women's units in the civil war. The notion strikes Trions who remember those days as repulsive, especially in peacetime. The women of this district haven't pressed the issue."

"Not the hill you want to die on, huh?"

She quirked an eyebrow and joined him at the parapet, reclining on muscular arms. "So to speak."

Flirting with Sarasta was the only other diversion Jack had, besides kibitzing over the militia drills. Amyand came to the hall to take calls from Malkon on his secure line, but he ignored all Jack's best efforts; his retainers seemed to not even notice; and flirting with Martha only seemed to make her homesick. But today Sarasta was not invested enough in the game to stay out in the brisk spring wind, and she soon left them. Martha leaned into the wind and sighed.

"So?" said Jack. "What's got you down, Doctor Jones—is it the food? The leaky roof? Don't tell me—you're pining for that interestingly rugged hired hand who's been pruning the orchard."

"Didn't even notice him. You've been holding out on me, Jack." But she cracked a smile, at least. "No. It's probably just that I feel so useless, stuck out here. But I can't stop thinking about that story of Amyand's, about the Doctor's Turlough. And I wonder how many others that's happened to."

"Losing their language, you mean?" Jack shrugged; he had a rough conception of the capabilities of the TARDIS's telepathic circuits, but only the faintest notion of how they actually worked.

"Yeah." The breeze picked up; Martha drew her hands up into her sleeves. "How many people have left the Doctor to stay in some new place, or new time? Have they all woken up aphasic, when the TARDIS decides she's done with them? Or when the Doctor does?"

"I was alone," said Jack, "when I woke up on Satellite Five. But when I got to Earth, there were languages I didn't know. My wristband did, for the most part. Had a few sticky moments when it shorted out—there was this time in Berlin..." He trailed off; Martha had wrapped her arms tight around her body, had on the tight smile that kept her lips from quivering.

"That's an answer, then," she said. "Do you think he knows?"

"You're jumping to conclusions, Doctor Jones."  Jack draped her in a fold of his coat and drew her close; she leaned into him without unwinding her arms. "Satellite Five, the Dalek invasion... that was when the Doctor regenerated. We know from Harriet Jones's deposition that the Doctor is a necessary part, somehow, of the TARDIS's translation protocols. Maybe what I experienced—maybe that was just because the Doctor was dead."

"'Just?'" she repeated. "Was he just dead when Turlough came to Trion, too?"

"Why not? We know he's regenerated before. Many times."

Martha let her head fall back onto Jack's shoulder. "That's… really not  a comforting thought just now." And it really wasn't, not with the Doctor kidnapped, incommunicado now for days. "Jack, I don't want to have to start all over again. I want to go home."

"And we will." He gestured out at the militia base, with the noses of its spaceplanes neatly lined up above the rooftops. "This is a galactic society, ships coming and going every day. Torchwood will pay our passage if UNIT won't; or we can work cargo for our fare; or if all else fails, I can steal us a ship and fly it home. Or you can—those little Sigrantine cutters have a voice-op autopilot that'll take you anywhere."

"Even not knowing the language?" And that was really the heart of it, wasn't it, the worry for the Doctor that never went away even when it wasn't your job to guard his back.

"Piece of cake," said Jack. "What's the name of the capitol again?"

"Actrion."

"See? That's all we need to know to hitchhike back." He turned her by the shoulders until she met his eyes. "We will get home," he said. "Worry about the Doctor, or about the Tractators, or anything else, but don't waste time worrying about that."

She tilted her head, studying his face. "You really want to go back, too, don't you?"

Jack let out a long breath. "This—" he waved vaguely at the horizon, and at what it hid, ships and spaceport and all. "It'll all still be here. Life expectancy in Torchwood..."

"I know the statistics," said Martha.

"And that's with me messing up the curve." And that got a genuine smile. "Martha, I promise, we will get back to Earth. Without my having to play Russian roulette for cash or your having to sell sexual favors."

"It's a deal," she said; and then, "Wait, but it's okay for _you_ to sell sexual favors?"

Jack shrugged. "Beats waiting tables. Hey, I want to get a look at that landing strip. You up for a walk?"

.

They didn't get their trip to the base that day, and Jack hadn't seriously thought they would. But the next morning, Amyand invited them on a tour unasked. "Like to know what you think," he said, including them both in the 'you.' "See how we compare to offworld."  
      
"Do you show all your prisoners the secret military bases?" Jack couldn't help bouncing on his heels, just a little—those field guns had to be running close to one hundred percent inertial suppression, and if the spaceplanes were using the same tech, they'd be the smoothest ride since... well. Since.  
      
Amyand scoffed. "They bring the schoolkids here to have a look round, every term. Besides, you're not prisoners much longer. Ministerium says you're to be exchanged for some of the President's men."  
      
"Exchanged?" said Martha. "With Earth? Who else does she have there?"  
      
Amyand shook his head at that. "Now that, I couldn't tell you."    
      
An evasive answer, but Jack thought it probably covered true ignorance; he didn't press. In any case, the contents of the base armory were much more exciting than another round-up of picayune little moles like Carbry.  
      
They got their look at the artillery, and at the null-inertial armillary mountings, and one of the pilot corps even led them out onto the tarmac to the planes and talked them through the cockpit, the weapons racks, the evac locks and medical bay. He was a Trion, not a Sarn; though Amyand commanded the militia division, the only Sarns Jack had seen in the more technical roles at the base were very young. Sarn must have been a low-tech place.  
      
And the Trions here were mostly older, veterans. Their guide had flown in the civil war and had the scars to prove it, flat burn scars cutting across his temple, right where a helmet retinal projector would have superheated. "Were you in something like this when you saw that firefight?" Jack swung up onto the tail section to get a look under the engine housings.  
      
The pilot popped the catch for him, and, oh, she was shiny where it counted. He grinned, just on the scarred side. "Got this on a close-approach solar patrol," he said. "On one of the old _Caelion-_class lighters. Nosed a flare right into three ships of the President's Own.  
      
Jack whistled. "In a lighter. Nice work."  
      
"Got the Governor's Star for it—'course, I can't wear it with this uniform, since the peace. Wish they could have taken away the nickname instead—I've been 'Sunny' ever since." He smiled with his whole face, a little abashed, and Jack could see how the name had stuck.  
      
"Suits you." He clapped Sunny on the neck—the scars just stayed white while he blushed, very pretty—and made room for him under the raised tail panel. "So tell me how this baby's propulsion compares with your old lighters."  
      
They were absorbed in a discussion of the wing guns when Martha— and when had she drifted away?—came pelting across the tarmac from the admin building. "Jack, it's the capitol. They're under fire."

Sunny swung the panel shut and began securing his ship; Jack followed Martha inside. Amyand was on the comm with Attris Daine. "The east wing is taken; half the Twenty-third Ground shot their way in, and they're trying to shoot their way out again."  
      
Jack knelt into camera range. "Half?"  
      
"The other half broke Carbry out of house arrest. They're fighting spaceport security and the Tenth Mobile on the Port Road access ramp."  
      
"How did Carbry sway a whole ground division?" Amyand demanded. "When was he even on this world?"  
      
"He's had nominal charge of the Agency research complex outside town," said Attris grimly. "Including very real control over the staffing rotas."    
      
"Let me guess," said Jack, leaning into the comm pickup, "the Twenty-third had guard duty there."  
      
"On very short rotations," she confirmed. "They've all had a turn at the facility by now."  
      
Martha pulled a chair up to the comm table. "Miss Daine, what was the facility researching. Fibers? A sort of smart monofilament, the Master—Despina's—invention?"  
      
"For a camouflage project, yes—you think the fiber could have done this?"  
      
"It can kill people by spooling out their cranial nerves; and we found a body on Luna that had been prepped for connection with a Tractator device in just the same way," said Martha. "It's possible Despina designed it as a neural interface."  
      
"They left casualties behind in the courtyard. I'll have their uniforms examined."  
      
"Take care," Jack said. "Don't expose the fabric to EM signals; it may have been programmed."  
      
"Noted." She conferred a moment with someone offscreen.

"Has Carbry made any demands?" asked Martha. "He must want something from the Ministerium."

Attris shrugged. "Just his ship and passage out. And records; he hasn't specified which."

"Local shipping, for a start," suggested Jack. "To set himself back up in the export business, he'd need a middleman. And he'd want the Agency's portfolios on the rest of the sector, if he decides Earth gets too hot."  
      
Amyand called them back to the moment. "Daine, how much firepower do you need to break siege? My men can be on the road within an hour."  
      
"Send them," she said immediately. "Any forces we need, we'll need here, and I know Turlough's force is incorruptible." She turned back to her offscreen interlocutor, then pushed her chair right out of the pickup. Amyand got on the internal comm and began giving orders: trucks and drivers; comm alerts; plasma caissons and stunner charges  
      
Attris reappeared, face suddenly gone pale. "Attris?"  
      
"It's the orbitals," she said. "Carbry's codes were current after all. He's got a rock on the rails, aimed at Actrion spaceport, and he says he'll let it loose if we don't comply."  
      
"It must be a bluff," said Martha. "He needs the spaceport to get offworld, doesn't he?"  
      
"He needs his ship," corrected Jack. "You're safe until he can acquire a secondary target."    
      
"Which will be soon." Attris's eyes darted offscreen, taking in readouts that reflected blue and amber against her cheek. "The port is scrambling to prepare an intercept now, but no one wants to give the launch order, not knowing what will trigger a barrage."  
      
Martha caught Jack's eye. "The spaceplanes. Jack, we're over the horizon from Actrion—"  
      
Amyand was already signaling for takeoff prep. "Each plane can carry four, plus pilots, but not all the men trained for topside are in yet." He looked up at Martha, speculatively. "Sounded like you two have some experience."  
      
"I'd say we do," she said.

Jack looked out onto the tarmac: small units in good order, well-drilled and well-equipped—but composed almost to a man of elderly veterans, young trainees, and pretechnological refugees. None of them would be his first pick for EVA. "We'll need hardsuits," he said. "Not those party balloons I saw on board."


	21. Chapter 21

Sarah Jane turned up enough trends and gossip at the Chanel party—and at the Dior party afterwards, and at the very exclusive reception after that—for a good, meaty pitch to_ Vogue_ and probably a puff piece, too.

Which was just as well. If anyone in Paris was breaking the Despex recall, or tunneling under the city, or wiring themselves into their neckties, no one was talking about it; she'd come away with nothing else but a hangover.

Ianto didn't even have that, damn him; though at least he looked properly guilty about it when he knocked at her door at half-past seven. He dragged her out into the sunlight, blinking, and took her round the corner for espresso that restored her will to live, or at least kicked her brain back into gear.

"How did you find the best coffee in Paris in one day? No, don't answer that—" Ianto shut his mouth, eyebrows still hovering quizzically. "Not if you're just going to tell me you found this place on a Twitter feed."

"I was going to say, it's my mutant power," Ianto deadpanned. "Freak accident with the rift manipulator and a French press. Jack had to give me intravenous espresso for months after."

"That, I believe." Sarah Jane drained the lees of her coffee and only by great strength of will resisted licking the cup clean. "So. Anything new from UNIT this morning?"

"Just negatives. No sign of Tractators, and no word from the Health Ministry on compulsory blood testing."

Sarah sighed. "Might as well head toward the Louvre, then. If all I'm getting out of this trip is fashion journalism, I should at least see some of the other shows."

"I suppose it might help," ventured Ianto, when they lucked into a bench on the Métro, "if we knew what the purpose of the Tractator excavations was. The other excavations, that is."

"You think they might be after something different here? Assuming they are here."

"If they are, they're being much more careful to stay hidden," said Ianto. "Maybe they're after something more secret, or more vital."

"The tunnels in Scarpton-le-dale seemed awfully large just for living in," Sarah mused. "Even if they were breeding an army, they wouldn't need that much space. And yet I didn't see any evidence they were doing anything else."

"And the other factory sites have been the same." The train jolted into Louvre-Rivoli; they shouldered their way out to the platform. "Vast spaces, poorly concealed."

Sarah pushed through the turnstile, and waited a few steps ahead for Ianto to follow. "So whatever they're after here, it's something specific to Paris. Something important enough to make them break their usual habits."

They emerged into the shopping arcade of the Carrousel du Louvre, part of the arterial flow of humanity: tourists and commuters breaking toward the street exits; early museum-goers window-shopping outside closed boutiques; architecture enthusiasts and Dan Brown fans snapping pictures of the famous inverted pyramid; and, filling a narrow corridor behind a velvet rope, journalists like herself, and bloggers and fashion enthusiasts, clutching runway show invitations. And just a few yards above their heads, hundreds of people queued outside the Louvre. By the time of the Despex show, it would be thousands, and thousands more outside on the streets, in the shops and offices, strolling through the Tuilleries and along the Seine. A bad place for a disaster. "I wish we had more backup," she said.  
   
And for a miracle backup arrived, before the doors of the Salle Soufflot had even opened; Sergeant Patel and two dozen mixed UNIT troops. "Laplace is still arguing with the Minister," Patel reported, "but he's got us permission to put up a cordon. Anything goes wrong, we can at least keep bystanders out—or any more bystanders, at least," he said, gesturing down the corridor with his chin. He set up a portable seismograph outside the doorway into the shopping arcade, then craned his neck to peer around the corner. "Wasn't that skylight in_ The Da Vinci Code?_"

Sarah took copious notes on three runway shows without remembering a thing she'd seen, then fled to bring lunch back for Patel's men. Colonel Carnot intercepted them on their way back; with him were Laplace, and a grizzled man Carnot introduced as one Dr. Lully, the Minister of Health. "We have reached an agreement," Carnot said, rather sourly. "There will be compulsory testing for Despex contamination of all persons in high-risk occupations—beginning Monday."

"Next week?" said Sarah. "Minister, you must understand how urgent—"

"I understand," interrupted Lully, "that even persons who handle the fiber every day may still not be affected, yes? And that there is no transmission of this toxin from person to person, and that the fiber has been entirely recalled, so where is new contamination to arise? Between now and then, who is to be affected, who is not already?

"And, equally—our scientists are satisfied that your Dr. Sullivan's test detects the contamination, but our doctors are no nearer a treatment than yours. With no ability to cure those affected—and with no need to quarantine them—then, as I have told the Colonel, I do not see how he is justified in sending soldiers to tap these people's veins, instead of leaving it to their own doctors and nurses, who can monitor their conditions, give our scientists something more to go on than a single tube of clotted blood."

Sarah forced herself to take a deep breath before answering. "Minister, those contaminants in the bloodstream are all that is left of an alien control device. The colonel has told you about these creatures—shown you pictures—"

"And if they should mount an attack, then I should be glad to follow the Colonel's commands. But this is a matter of public health," he said, addressing himself to Carnot again. "And UNIT's authority does not extend so far." He swept past them into the Salle, flashing an invitation; Carnot stalked in after him.

"Perquisites of the job?" murmured Sarah to Laplace.

"The colonel warned him there might be some difficulty at the show. He said if there were, he should like to see it firsthand." The adjutant shrugged. "For years, Minister Lully petitions the UN to give more support to occupational health measures, and it is never enough. Now at last Geneva takes notice, and soldiers come in to take blood by force—" He shrugged. "We'll get our testing." He didn't sound any happier than Sarah was.

Ianto had saved Sarah Jane's seat in the hall; she sat down beside him as the lights went down, and the models from Despex took the runway.

Bernhardt began with simple sheath dresses— stripes, plaid, big windowpane checks, all straight out of the eighties—on surprisingly curvy models. Beside her, Ianto sat bolt upright—and not watching the models' swaying hips, either. "What is it? Is that Despex after all?"

"It might be a print. You see how those pinstripes aren't parallel?" She did, now that he pointed it out. "The model's not nearly that busty; she can't be, for the dress to hang right. It's all done by varying the size of the print."

The models struck silhouettes before the backlit scrim, and their lush-seeming figures flattened. In the front row, Bernhardt was beaming.

"You can tell these were designed for Despex," murmured Ianto. A lone model advanced and twirled, in blue bias-cut paisley with a peplum; hideous, but it made her waist look about the width of her neck. "If that's silk or rayon, then the print was scaled especially for the model; the design and the tailoring both have to be flawless to achieve that sort of trompe l'oeil effect."

And Despex could do it with a chip and a sensor. "Maybe we've all been wrong," said Sarah Jane. "Maybe this _is _Bernhardt's great surprise."

The floor shook, just once, not enough to make the model stumble. "Or maybe not," said Ianto.

Sarah's phone vibrated; Sergeant Patel had texted a single "!"

"Keep an eye out." She slid past Ianto and into the aisle and backed out of the hall, as unobtrusively as she could; Carnot and Laplace were standing and moving, the colonel toward the stage doors, Laplace after her.

The UNIT troops were spread out—in the shelter of shop doors, at the Louvre entrance and the street stairs, kneeling beneath the inverted pyramid; they'd herded the civilians into the shops, and the arcade was deserted. Sarah knelt down by Sergeant Patel, who peered down the hall from the doorway of a perfumer's, weapon at the ready. "Seismograph jumped, just the once," he said, nodding to her and Laplace without looking up. "Then it went quiet. But no one's come up this hallway since; no one's come up from the Métro. I sent Hodges to check it out and he's not back either."

Laplace relayed this into his headset. "No disturbances at the show."

"Yet." In the shop behind them, two American girls whispered furiously over whether they should ask her what was going on. "Nothing yet," Sarah hissed over her shoulder. "And if you stay out of sight, we might keep it—" she broke off. Under the store's muzak and the thud of the runway music, she heard a faint rhythm, like marching feet. It came from—

From the Métro exits. "Oh, _no._" Patel swallowed; Laplace drew his sidearm. A double line of Tractators stepped off the escalators; and two abreast turned to four as more joined them from the stairs. Tractators, plodding in cadence, spilling up from the subways as endless and mindless as a line of ants.

From shops down the arcade, people began to scream; and from down the corridor, shouts rose over the runway show's pounding bass to join them.

~*~  
 

Turlough woke to a still-darkened cabin. The Doctor sat curled in the porthole window-well, one long leg drawn up and the other dangling. He was dressed again, even to shoes and jacket, but he'd left his tie off; Turlough wished he knew how great an intimacy the glimpse of pale skin at his throat was meant to be.

He didn't turn when he felt Turlough's gaze, just tapped at the window, or at the star-streaks behind it. "We're about two hours out from the moonbase."

"Is that stellar navigation, or dead reckoning?" Turlough rummaged for his shirt in the wreckage of the bed.     

The Doctor shrugged. "Bit of both."

The shirt was creased beyond remedy; Turlough put it on anyway. "She can't threaten Earth directly from Luna. No rail guns in the Terran system," he said, bitterly. "She'll have to go planetside for hostages." The Doctor did look his way at that. "At least—" Turlough stumbled; Despina's plans had sounded clear enough last night, but it was hard to frame the question when they didn't appear to be talking about last night. "She does mean to go back," he finally ventured. "To the Time War. Doesn't she?"

The Doctor's eyelids dipped shut, and with them closed, Turlough could see how drawn his face was. "Yeah."

"So she'll need the TARDIS."

The Doctor looked back through the porthole, and kept staring after his breath had fogged it. "Will he, though? Cause that can't be Plan A. Not if he's been thinking about it for as long as I think he has."

"Since the Daleks came back? It's possible. Despina—noticed. The way I did." He sighed. "I should have known then. I should at least have suspected."

The Doctor didn't contradict him. Turlough bundled up the rest of his clothes and retreated into the head; the Doctor still hadn't moved when he came out, dressed and toweling his hair. "Doctor?" Turlough leaned against the strut flanking the portal, not quite in his space. "Can she do it? Change history?"

The Doctor looked up, seeming to see him properly for the first time all morning. "Probably. If the Daleks did it, then it's possible. But the effects…" He shrugged. "Catastrophic. Probably."

"On the Master? Or on us?"

"On the web of Time; on causality itself." He laughed, just once. "No, the worst it could do the Master is drive him mad. Madder." His brow furrowed. "He doesn't have that far to go, really."

Turlough snorted. "You sound surprised. The Master's been a megalomaniac as long as I've known him." And probably paranoid to boot, though Turlough felt he was in no position to judge that one himself. "Was there ever a time he wasn't?" He began rhetorically, but ended in a genuine question.

The Doctor shook his head, silently, a long time before answering; he seemed not to even notice. "There was a time it was easier to overlook. He started out just trying to kill me."

"I tend to find it very difficult to overlook people trying to kill me."

"No, but that was different," said the Doctor breezily. "A lot of people have tried to kill me—you did, for one. To tell the truth, I don't think I make it that hard for them, some of the time. Wanting to kill me for my sake, that was just—between us."  
      
One more thing Turlough and the Master had in common. Turlough wrapped his arms around himself to keep out a shiver.  
      
"Even—what he did to Earth—" the Doctor went on, all the ease gone from his voice, "that was for my sake, too. All of it.  
      
"But this—" he shook his head— "what he's doing now—this is bigger than me."  
      
The shiver hit his lips as a snort. "You mean it's not all about you any longer?" It was all Turlough could do not to laugh aloud. "Yes, I can see how that might be a problem for you."  
      
The Doctor glared up at him—for a moment, he looked genuinely wounded, which Turlough wished he felt anything but triumphant over. But then his features softened, taking the anger back in on himself, and there went Turlough's triumph. "I don't know what it is about any more," he said. "His madness, his anger. And I don't know how to stop it."

.

They docked in the sublunar bay just on the Doctor's schedule. It was nearly another hour before Despina came for them. "The dispatches from Earth must be urgent," Turlough observed. "That could be good for us."  
      
"Or very bad," said the Doctor.  
      
Despina arrived alone, armed, her black suit looking like a couture version of her guards' fatigues. Turlough felt distinctly underdressed—and felt as good as naked when her eyes went immediately to the fading print of his teeth on the Doctor's neck. "That wasn't me," she observed. She reached out a gloved hand to trace the bruise; the Doctor tensed, visibly, trying not to flinch under—toward?—her touch.

She turned away as though he weren't there; Turlough blushed under her gaze. "Of course. He never touches anyone, except to distract himself from someone else." She smiled horribly. "Did I ever tell you about the last time he came to me? Voluntarily, that is?"

"Stop it," said the Doctor, but Despina was waiting for an answer from him.

"No."

"It was after his dear Miss Grant—"

"Stop it!" The Doctor's face was white. "Despina—Master—"

"And now I've embarrassed him. He doesn't like being outwitted," she murmured.

"Maybe I don't like being reminded of my mistakes." The Doctor looked her up and down, loathing on his face.  
      
"Ah, you see—I prefer to learn from mine. Which is why you will stay in my sight." She drew her stunner, though she kept it spun down to green. "To the airlock. Quickly."  
    

She marched them through the lunar base. Turlough saw now why he had never been allowed to make the Earth run: the whole base was unmistakably Tractator work, and his hands were clammy just walking through the tunnels. The walls reflected their faces, smeared and pale against the polished sheen. Stumbling into the transmat pod, with its matte-burnished dials, was a relief.

The transmat put them down in a warehouse: bales of fabric in the distance, half-empty pallets around the pod, piled with bags of tea and coffee and redolent with spilled traces of the same. It smelled gloriously fresh; business had proceeded in their absence.

Business meant transport, Turlough thought—lorries and cargo boats and fast delivery vehicles with the windows blanked out. But Despina did not march them out into the street, or to a garage; instead, she poked left-handed at the transmat panel—entering what figures Turlough couldn't see, though he craned his neck—and wormed her hand into a control bracelet where it hung in the rack. "Surface-to-surface," she explained, raising her arm to let it shimmy into place. "Limited, but effective enough within range." She snaked her gun hand up over Turlough's shoulder and chucked his chin with the muzzle. He heard the clicks as she spun the dial up to Kill, one-handed.

"And now, Doctor, take my arm. I'd advise against moving, unless you fancy losing body parts." The Doctor glared under his eyebrows at the stunner and silently extended his arm, a parody of chivalry. Despina took it decorously, thunked the bracelet control once against her breastbone, and they vanished.

This time the transmat was so fast it burned, like pins-and-needles inside; they must still be very close to the warehouse. Turlough materialized with spring air on his neck, city sounds—a suburban garden somewhere—and the TARDIS before his face. Despite everything, his heart leapt.

Despina jammed the stunner bruisingly hard into his neck; Turlough could see the mauve indicator now, in the corner of his eye. "And now, Doctor—" She let go his arm, frog-marched Turlough a few paces back from the TARDIS— "open the door."

The Doctor looked at Turlough without meeting his eyes, and pressed his lips together whitely. "You know I can't let you go. Master."

Her breath fumed across his cheek. "Doctor. I still have Tractator nests on this planet. Open the door, or I kill not only Turlough, but as many humans as they can slay before I stop them." She rattled the bracelet down her other hand, almost to within reach of her fingers. Turlough wondered if he could grab it before she shot, knew he couldn't.

"No, Master." He said the name deliberately, and loudly—she flinched, just a bit, but that was all. "Because I know how many lives are at stake if you get my TARDIS. I can't let you in." His eyes were wide—pleading, even, though not with Turlough...

"Please," shouted Turlough, just to make noise. "Please don't." If he was wrong it couldn't hurt, and if he was right—

Despina stiffened, having never heard the footfalls behind them. "Drop the gun," grumbled a voice, low and elderly and oddly familiar. "If you really are the Master, I won't hesitate to fire."

"Neither will I," she said, jabbing the stunner into Turlough's throat for emphasis. "Are you fast enough to take that chance? With this man's life?"

"She'll do it," Turlough said, just to have it on the record.

"Despina—Master." The Doctor pulled out his TARDIS key, letting it jingle and glint on its chain. "I give in." He sounded beaten. His hand reached out reluctantly for the lock; and helplessly, Despina turned to look.

Just a fraction, but it was enough; Turlough dropped, deadweight, half out of her reach, and the instant the muzzle was pointed into space, their unseen ally clocked Despina on the head—with a cane, not a gun. But she stumbled, only dizzied, and the Doctor threw open the TARDIS door. "Inside, quickly!" Turlough ran half-crouched; the other came barreling in after him and slammed the doors. And there they were. Saved.

Turlough straightened and almost fell again; his knees were weak. The other man—white-haired and solid, still familiar—took him by the arm and propped him on a railing that hadn't been there in Turlough's day. The whole console room was nothing like it had been in Turlough's day, arching ceilings and watery light failing to distract from the scuffs and dents in the console, the stripped insulation and exposed tangles of circuitry.  "She's seen hard times," he murmured.

The Doctor patted the TARDIS console consolingly, flicking on a scanner feed while he was at it. "We do all right, though." He smiled, almost shyly, to Turlough and to their other guest.

"I suppose you are the Doctor," the man grunted. "Inconsiderate, getting younger all the time."

"But here you still are," crowed the Doctor, smile losing all its shyness. And Turlough had just about placed the man— imagine him younger, and he was— "Brigadier!"

—was bloody Lethbridge-Stewart from bloody Brendon School. "What are you doing here?" he couldn't help saying.

"Keeping an eye on the place for Miss Smith," he answered, addressing the Doctor. "She's gone to Paris, hunting down a hive of those Tractator insects."  
   
"Good old Sarah Jane," crowed the Doctor. "Knew we could count on her. And on you." He grinned at Lethbridge-Stewart and turned back to the console; outside on the scanner view, Despina was talking rapidly into her wrist.

"Doctor, unless I'm quite mistaken, that woman outside is Mrs. Saxon—or Miss Norman, or whatever she's calling herself."

"She's the Master. It's him, Brigadier. As power-mad as ever."

He raised his eyebrows. "Well, that does explain some of her odder business practices."

"Yes, about that." The Doctor flicked a switch, thumped the console and flicked it again; the time rotor spun up and whirred idly. "How do we stand? The Despex?"

"Recalled," said the Brigadier. "UNIT has the factories surrounded--  they've all got nests of those things under them; the plant managers have been using Despex nerve extensions to control them." And that made sense, Turlough thought; of course she would centralize everything nefarious onto Despex-owned land. Though in Paris they hardly would have room for a Tractator hatchery; almost everything was leased, the storefront and the workshop space, one could get anything one needed in Paris—

"What's the date?" Turlough demanded. "Are we into Fashion Week yet?"

The Brigadier raised his eyebrows. "Yes—Miss Smith suspected things might come to a head at the Despex show."

Turlough looked to the Doctor. "The whole Earthside upper management will be there; people who've spent months up to their elbows in the stuff. If she has worked out how to make a neural interface of it—if there are Tractators in Paris—"

"Brigadier, when's the Despex runway show?" The Doctor shot a look at Despina; she was tapping rapidly at her wrist.

"Today." He glanced at his watch. "Should be starting any minute now, in fact."

"In the Carrousel du Louvre," Turlough added. "Salle Soufflot," though surely that was too much precision to ask of the TARDIS, and indeed the Doctor began muttering under his breath about short hops.

Outside, Despina vanished in a haze of transmat glow. The Doctor leapt at the controls. "She'll leave a chronospoor. We can follow her— it's very faint, but with those parameters—" The time rotor engaged. "There!"

With the old familiar sound, they were in flight.

Turlough leaned against the console, unable to keep from grinning; whatever else happened, this was one more flight in the TARDIS than he'd ever thought he'd have. He looked up to see the Brigadier frowning at him.

"I know you," he accused. "Vassily Turlough. You caused a great deal of trouble, disappearing from Brendon—and the face of the Earth," he added, with a stern look at the Doctor.

The Doctor started like a schoolboy himself, but cut off his excuses with "Vassily?"

Turlough sighed, and offered his hand to the Brigadier. "It's Vislor, actually. And I'm sorry about that."

"Vislor Turlough," the Doctor elaborated. "Thane of Turlough. The Turlough of Turlough, in fact." He bounced on his toes and turned back to the scanners. "How'd you end up a Vassily?"  

"Carbry's private joke," said Turlough. "It amused him, calling the little aristo 'prince.' Or is it 'king'? _Basileos_, anyway."

The Doctor gaped. "Do you mean to tell me they taught you Greek at that school?

"Just the one term," said Turlough. "I switched to Italian after that; it was easier." The Brigadier sighed and muttered something about the benefits of a classical education.

"Even so," said the Doctor, cutting him off, "one term, you didn't pick up Despina? _Demos-potnia—despoina? _

"Oh." Turlough felt suddenly very foolish, and said so.

"Well?" said the Brigadier. "My schoolboy Greek was more than sixty years ago, Doctor."  

"_Despoina_ is the feminine of _despotes_," said Turlough, and even the Brigadier could take it from there.

"Master."  
     



	22. Chapter 22

The Tractators marched mindlessly and inexorably down the arcade and around the corner toward the Salle Soufflot. Gunfire had no effect on their armored carapaces; and physical barriers—benches, people—they merely flung aside in a violet nimbus of gravitic fields. Laplace, in the first wave of UNIT troops, was thrown like a rag doll into the pier between shop windows; he crumpled with a sickening crunch, and Sarah Jane saw shards of bone slide down the wall behind him, islands of white in the spreading pool of blood.  
      
His men, the ones that hadn't got near enough to be caught, fell back against the walls to regroup. Patel made to join them; Sarah grabbed his arm. "Call them back! Get your men into the hall and find out what they're doing!"  
      
Patel murmured orders into his headset, and the remaining men—the survivors, Sarah thought, and tamped the word ruthlessly down—began to creep along the walls, dodging planters and cardboard display flats. Sarah swept her gaze over the band of civilians huddled against the counters. "Stay _here,_" she hissed. "And whatever you do, don't get in their way." She slipped out behind Patel, and followed him. The Tractators were almost near enough to touch—she could see the cilia on their mouth palps, the individual facets on their eyes—but as long as she kept to the wall, out of their path, she was nothing to them; they had eyes for nothing but their mysterious goal.  
      
Which was no less mysterious when she got back to the auditorium. She couldn't go inside; the doorway was too narrow to let her keep her distance from the marching insects. She fell into line with the UNIT cordon, pressed to the wall, and they waited for the Tractators to pass.  
      
Finally, the end of the line came in sight. "I count a hundred and twenty," hissed Patel, "give or take a couple when I had my eyes shut." A hundred twenty Tractators, in a standing-room crowd. It had to be pandemonium in there; and indeed she could see the flashes of violet, and hear the screams. The last two Tractators passed through the door, and the UNIT troops pelted in after. Sarah followed, at a distance; her gorge was rising and there was nothing she could do but observe.  
      
Just inside the door, Ianto waited, looking as green as she felt, but holding on. "Look at the runway," he said, though it was hard to look away from the carnage the Tractators were wreaking, as they bulled their way to the front row. "Look at the models."  
      
They were all out now, some she'd seen and some she hadn't; and those dresses had all been Despex, because they were all raveling now, bundles of threads snaking down from hems and up from necklines, to plunge into the models' spines and unreel beneath their skins. Under the spotlight, one porcelain-pale woman bared her teeth and keened, while Sarah watched the crimson threads of her dress burrow under her translucent skin, tracing every inch of spine the falling bodice bared.  
      
From their hands, and what was left of their sleeves, the models reached writhing cords out into the front rows, out to the Tractators who patiently waited in the now-vacant seats.  
      
Or not so vacant—some rested carapaces or back feet on the bodies of the ticket-holders. Sarah swallowed bile. "Look at Bernhardt's PA."  
      
"Rene," Ianto supplied. "Who only wears natural fibers." He too was caught up in the web, the only part of it still moving. His gloves had sprouted tendrils into his phone, and his thumbs were an inhuman blur on its keypad.

In the back of the hall, UNIT chivvied those still standing out through the fire exits. Patel, at the end of the line, caught her eye. "Go on," Sarah called; the Tractators took no notice. "We'll get out through the street door."

Only not just yet. "So Bernhardt was telling the truth," Sarah said. "The clothes were the only surprise he had in mind."

"One of the models backhanded him into the wall," Ianto said. "Two of the spectators took him away with UNIT; he may be alive." His voice fell to a whisper; it was almost impossible to speak up, though the models were as deaf to them, and as blind, as the Tractators.

"What are they doing now?" The Tractators all lifted their antennae toward the runway. At its foot, a violet glow was taking shape. "It's a gravity field," Sarah murmured, "but what's its focus?"

The violet field grew in brightness and intensity. For long minutes, nothing else moved. There was no sound but the hum of the massed Tractators; Sarah strained her ears, listening, and the shock, when it came, almost knocked her off her feet—not from in the hall, but from outside: the cataclysmic roar of a thousand panes of shattering glass.  
      
The Tractators still did not move. With a final glance over her shoulder, she ran out of the hall, Ianto behind her. The arcade was clear, but for the shards of glass still bouncing and spinning down the floor, past the inverted pyramid—  
      
—from the Louvre entrance. "They've brought down the pyramid!" she gasped. Footfalls crunched against marble and glass.  
      
"Well, it couldn't happen to a more deserving landmark," prattled Ianto. Internal filters were the first thing to go. "And who are _they_?"  
      
I don't know, was on Sarah's tongue. But then the Doctor came pelting up through the doorway; and at his heels, a young red-haired man, and bringing up the rear, Sir Alastair.  
      
"Where is she?" roared the Doctor. "Don't tell me you let her get away?"  
      
"Her?" Sarah was already running for all she was worth back to the hall. "_Her _who?" she called. "Lucy Saxon?"  
      
"The Master," called the Doctor. Sarah did the last few steps in a flying leap, skidding to a halt against the first row of—thankfully empty—seats.  
      
The others piled in after her. "Dear god," muttered Sir Alastair. The air above the runway was a swirling vortex of violent purple light; it hurt the brain as much as the eyes to look at.  
      
And coming towards it, sashaying down the runway as though she owned it, and in fact she did, was Lucy Saxon. Despina Norman. The Master, the Doctor had said, and Sarah Jane had attended enough UNIT reunions to have a very healthy fear of that name.  
      
"Despina!" the Doctor called; she didn't even check. "Master!"  
      
She did halt at that, and raise one golden brow—as much, Sarah thought, at the crack in the Doctor's voice as at the name. "You cannot stop me, Doctor," she said. "The gravitic fissure can only be closed at my command now. I do not need you or your TARDIS to go where I will." She smiled, beatific and mad and utterly beguiling. "You could still come with me, Doctor."  
      
She leapt. Ianto, the only one of them who was armed, drew his weapon from under his jacket, but too late—the vortex spiraled in on itself and vanished; Ianto's bullet took out a klieg light; and as one, the Tractators lowered their antennae and turned, and saw them.

      
The red-haired man turned sheet-white and stumbled back right into Sarah Jane. "Doctor?"  
      
"Run," said the Doctor. The young man didn't need to be told twice. Ianto and Sir Alastair paused to shut and lock the doors behind them, and then they were all running, down the arcade, kicking up broken glass on all sides.  
Sarah was very, very glad she'd packed the boots.  
      
In the Louvre entrance, the glass was deeper, and the TARDIS sat in the middle of it, surrounded by a cordon of uniforms—museum security, civil police, and—thank heaven!— a few UNIT troops, who snapped to attention on seeing Sir Alastair. Sarah left him to do the talking and surveyed the wreckage: The pyramid was almost entirely denuded of glass, and even the frame was bent away from a gaping hole in the side. On benches below the stairs, EMTs were treating a handful of civilians bleeding from shrapnel cuts; for the first time, Sarah noticed the sirens wailing outside.  
      
There were not nearly so many casualties as she would have expected. "Colonel Carnot must have called for an evacuation," she murmured.  
      
"They were shooing everyone up the stairs when we crashed," said the redhead.  
      
"The TARDIS did this?"  
      
"We followed Despina's transmat trail," he said, very flatly; he was really distressingly pale. "The TARDIS might have taken that instruction a bit literally." He froze in place, staring over her shoulder. "They're coming. The Tractators."  
      
And they were, plodding up the arcade, not hurrying a bit. Sarah glanced at the Doctor, and at Sir Alastair, still in heated discussion with the authorities. "What's taking them so long? We can evacuate all these people, if they'll just let us into the TARDIS!"  
      
"No. You can evacuate them," said the Doctor, detaching himself. "UNIT's got weapons and transport at street level; they'll be down momentarily." His face was almost as pale as the young man's, but grimmer.  
      
"But—you're not even going to stay to help?"  
      
"The Master's chronospoor is fading already. If I'm to follow, I have to go now." He looked between Sarah and Ianto. "I need someone to come along and fill me in on what's been going on here. The Brigadier's already volunteered, but—"  
      
—but this was her chance. Maybe her only chance. She was amazed how steady her voice was. "Doctor, I can't. My son—"  
      
"I know." He touched her face; she hadn't even felt the tears.

Behind them, one of Carnot's lieutenants—Lavoisier? something like that— took one look at the advancing Tractators and, visibly picking his battle, saluted Sir Alastair. "Go ahead, sir."  
      
"Doctor," began Sir Alastair.  
      
The Doctor pressed a key into the young man's hand. "Turlough, get in the TARDIS. Sarah Jane, go save the world. You, you were Torchwood—"  
      
"Ianto Jones, sir. Doctor, are Jack and Martha—"  
      
"Still on Trion," said Turlough from the TARDIS door. "Jack was dead last we saw, but the Doctor assures me he can get over that. There's a ship on Luna that will get you there; it's not guarded very heavily. The transmat link is—"  
      
"—in Carbry's warehouse," finished Sarah.  
      
"Oh, good, you know." He squinted at her. "Didn't we meet on Gallifrey? It's like Old Home Week around here." He vanished into the TARDIS, still looking queasy, and the Doctor and Sir Alastair followed. With a clatter of boots, Carnot led his heavily-armed reinforcements down the stalled escalator from street level; when Sarah turned back, the TARDIS had started to fade.  
      
She watched it go. The Tractator column halted, just where it had been. "I think we're in the line of fire," she observed.  
      
"So we are," said Ianto. They retreated, away from Carnot and from the Tractators, into the shelter of an information kiosk, keeping the entrance to the arcade in view. "Someone needs to get back behind the Tractators and get those people in the shops up to the street."  
      
"I think Colonel Carnot is about to provide a distraction," said Ianto. Sarah clapped her hands to her ears just before the gunfire burst out.

  
~*~

"You people build good hardware, I'll give you that." Unnecessarily _complicated _hardware—it had taken Jack and Martha longer to get into their borrowed hardsuits than for Sunny to get his _Governor's Star _off the ground—but good: the suits had 270-degree faceplates with snap-down mirrored visors for outside work, and adjustable-flow oxygen feeds with sockets for up to three tanks.  
      
Jack took a third tank. It was the first rule of space: no matter how short the mission, you never passed up a chance to empty your bladder or fill your lungs. He checked his seals, checked Martha's, turned around to let her double-check his own.  
      
"And your weaponry's not bad, either." Not stinting on firepower was the second rule of space, or of just about anything, in Jack's experience. He loaded his cargo harness with explosive charges and hefted a blaster experimentally. "Needle blast radius, one-meter diffusion—" about typical for topside work, that—"_fantastic_ inertial damping. Shame it's so underpowered." He checked the thing's charge levels and holstered it anyway. "God, I miss Villaingard."  
      
"First aid's pretty basic," said Martha, in the same tone. She closed the medkit and strapped it to her thigh. "Even assuming we can use Trion drugs." Suited first aid amounted to plugging an ampoule of clotting factor or oxygenation enhancer into a cannula above the femoral artery and hoping for the best.  
      
"It won't be far to the ship." Martha smiled thinly, taking the reassurance as meant. Neither of them mentioned that the ship would be empty of help, except for Sunny, tied to his conn. There had been three pilots within shouting distance of the base, so Amyand had sent up all three spaceplanes, though it had meant breaking up crews and sending ships up with unrated copilots, or in Sunny's case, no copilot at all. Jack had volunteered them for the short-handed crew. Even Martha had more EVA time in than the whole Turlough militia put together; they wouldn't need help getting outside, doing the job.  
      
Speaking of which... "Sunny!" shouted Jack up the cockpit hatch. "How we doing?"  
      
"Approaching Platform One in four minutes... mark. You want a look at it, here's your chance."  
      
They crowded into the cockpit. "The others on course?" One Turlough ship was en route to Platform Three, on the other side of the planet, and the other to Two, just over the horizon. Four, which threatened mostly ocean, would have to wait for one of them to get to it second.

"Checked in just now. We'll be first to our target by a fair amount."

Platform One hung over Actrion: a long elliptical torus, pierced with loading bays along its equator. A flattened tube filled most of the inner curve, joined to the torus at fore and aft and in two wide round locks at the midpoint. Cargo bots crawled on microcog tracks along the seam between inner and outer sections.

"What's that?" Martha pointed over Sunny's shoulder. "Something moved, at the joint."

"Explosive bolts. Good eye, Miss." And now that Jack looked he could see it; the fore and aft hatches had sealed, leaving the midsection attached only at the central locks.

"The launch tube pivots on the central wheels," he explained. "I bet you set the angle by locking those cargo pods in place; very clever."

"So it's a catapult," said Martha.

"With a magnetic boost. Lucky they've got a nickel-iron asteroid belt."

"How much boost can they get with this thing?"

 "You don't need much. If you can angle your mass in on an impact trajectory, gravity will give it all the momentum you need."

"Wait a minute—how accurate can that be? No matter how precisely those pod tracks are calibrated, you'd only be able to guess at air resistance—no two asteroids are alike."

Sunny answered, giving the thrusters another burst and dumping most of their velocity. "No air resistance with a spaceborne target."  
      
"And I suppose if you're turning something like this on your own people," said Martha, "a little imprecision makes it a better threat."  
      
"We should get below," said Jack.  
      
They watched on the airlock's screen as Sunny matched their velocity with the orbital and maneuvered into in a holding position outside the docking ring. "Oh, smooth," he said, by way of testing his helmet radio. "I like a man with steady hands."  
      
"I'm not putting out the umbilical." Jack could almost see the pilot blushing. "Too great a risk of detection. You can spacewalk, cycle the lock manually."  
      
"Got it. Ready for EVA." And _Governor's Star_ took back their air and let them go.  
      
It was a short walk, a few meters, just long enough to orient—the long fall over the half-shadowed curve of the world was down; the longer fall into blackness was up; and forward was the gunmetal iris of the station lock, blooming for him the moment he hit the override.  
      
Inside was simple. The main grabway went straight to a control cabin behind one of the midsection pivot locks. There was a rock on the rails, visible through two sets of windows, but whoever had loaded it was gone; the station was empty and echoing. "We could plant charges," said Martha. "Just to be on the safe side."

"And when the Master comes back? Or the Daleks?"  
      
"All right, just a thought. Can we at least disarm the explosive bolts on the launch doors?"  
      
"For you, we can vent the pivot lubricant, too." Jack did both—the control panels weren't designed to be intuitive, but with all those hardwired knobs and switches, there were a limited number of places to look. "Sabotage accomplished. And now."  
      
He entered the hard shutdown codes: Ninety. Thirty. Eighty-four. Nineteen. The computer thought a moment, and the room went dark.  
      
Jack flipped a few switches; no response. "Codes are good. Let's go."

      
Getting out was harder than getting in—the lock iris itself had a discrete emergency power system, but it took precious seconds to warm up—but it was smooth enough. Burst of thrusters, glide across the gulf, cycle back into _Star'_s bright little hold. "Sunny, we're good to go for Platform Four."  
      
"Thrusters mark." He gave them a long burn; Jack felt the microgravity interfere with the ship's artificial field, a disconcerting sensation of leaning on a moiré grill.  
      
Martha felt it too, and cracked her helmet. "What's the hurry? Are the other ships all right?"  
      
"_Thane Enzel _is docked at Two; _Coraxel _is en route to the Three, all systems green. But my gravitic sensors up here are picking up a really big rock at Four. Maneuvering towards the loading doors."  
      
"Groundside?" Jack swapped his used O2 canister for a fresh one, though they'd only been out—he checked his chrono— thirteen minutes. Not bad, for as long as it had been since he'd drilled any of this.  
      
"Groundside doesn't know. Presumed to be Carbry's forces."  
      
"Can he control them from groundside?" wondered Martha. She switched out her own air canisters; Jack leaned over to check her seals.  
      
"Better hope he can," said Sunny from the cockpit. "If he's actually suborned the troops, this isn't just one man's treason. It's insurrection. It's civil war."  
   



	23. Chapter 23

"So where's she off to in such a rush?" The Brigadier leaned comfortably on the console room rail. "Or he, I suppose."  
      
Turlough shadowed the Doctor around the console, watching him pummel the controls, but the panels were so changed from his time he only understood half of what he saw. Destination parameters were clear enough, though—a search-and-follow spiral into the vortex. "He's gone back into the Time War," the Doctor said, distracted. "To prevent the destruction of Gallifrey."  
       
"And you're going to stop him?" scoffed Lethbridge-Stewart. "Oh, I know, changing history and whatnot, but it seems to me, if there were ever a time to just look the other way..."  
      
The Doctor's head shook for several beats before he spoke. "Not and change that history. The consequences could be—" he grasped for words, settled on "—catastrophic."  
      
"The Daleks did it," Turlough said.  
      
"The Daleks changed Dalek history," he snapped. "Even raving mad, Dalek Caan had the sense not to meddle with the outcome of the battle. It took one man, left for dead, and hid him in a pocket of time, away from..." He twisted the chronostat savagely. "It's different."  
      
Turlough took up a position across the console, though he still didn't know what half the controls mapped to. "Away from?"  
      
"Away from me." His eyes were on the controls. "Turlough, keep an eye on those readings for me. Hold on, Brigadier." He threw the levers and dematerialized.  
      
It was a bumpier ride than Turlough remembered, though whether that was the TARDIS showing her age, or just another detail lost to the haze of memory, he couldn't have said.  
      
"All right," said the Doctor. "Situation on Earth—the Tractators, the Despex. Brigadier?"  
      
"We've located Tractator colonies beneath every Despex plant. They've been fairly quiet, but seismic activity shot back up to its highest levels, just about half an hour before you turned up. They've all gone back to digging—no idea why." The Doctor hmmed worriedly. "We've got them at bay in the mines, though," continued Lethbridge-Stewart. "Without orders from the human controllers, they don't seem to take any hostile action."  
      
"No, I wouldn't think so. You're not blowing the mines up, I hope?"

There was a bitterness there Turlough couldn't read, though he thought Lethbridge-Stewart could. The Brigadier raised his eyebrows. "No, we thought about it, but it didn't seem like it would deter them for very long."

"Gold star for UNIT. What about the Graves—the human controllers?"  
      
"We can identify them with a blood test. No way to undo the programming yet, but Sullivan and his team are working on it."  
      
"What, Harry, is he? Good man." Yet another old friend, Turlough supposed; but the Doctor barely even smiled. As grim as that, then. "How close are you to cracking the Despex neural code? Programming the Tractators for hibernation or something, until you can get them offworld?"  
      
That finally wrong-footed him. "We've been concentrating on engaging the insects above ground, actually. With mortar fire."  
      
The Doctor rolled his eyes, an endeavor that seemed to involve his whole upper body. "Never change, you lot."  
      
"Is that a complaint," said Turlough, "or a request?" That caught the Doctor's attention, finally; he turned a bleak face up to Turlough's. It was an assessment, Turlough realized—the Doctor testing and accepting Earth's chances, if he didn't make it back.  
      
And who knew what was going on back on Trion, or who would save his planet? Turlough dropped his eyes back to the console. Geometer there, stabilizers where you'd never think to look, gravitic anomalizer there, and— "Doctor, gravitic compensation is off the scale."  
      
"There's a black hole where the Eye of Harmony used to be," he said. His calm was frightening. "Well, it always was a black hole, but it's a little more traditional now."  
      
"We're heading straight toward it," Turlough pointed out, rather disturbingly calm himself.  
      
"Into it," the Doctor corrected. "That's our way through the Time Locks."  
      
"But you can't take the TARDIS through a black hole!"  
      
"Well, it's not just _any_ black hole! Here, plot a reverse-asymptotic breakaway course from the gravity well."  
      
He did, with an ease that surprised him. But then he still remembered everything else he'd learned with people waving guns at him; he supposed he was lucky they'd taught him one useful thing, along with the paranoia and the detachment.  
      
"The tricky part," the Doctor continued, "is going to be riding this time vector back to before the black hole's collapse. But if we can hold out right—" he laid in a vector Turlough desperately hoped he'd misread— "right up to the singularity point, it should get us through the worst of the chronotic interference. Hold tight, everyone!"  
      
The TARDIS shuddered, and then reality seemed to shudder inside her: Turlough's vision pulsed and stretched with the churning of the time rotor, and the view on the scanner persisted, overlaid on his perceptions, even after he looked away: roiling colors, a boiling atmosphere, a planet crumbling into nothing and blooming back, present and absent—_presence _and _absence_, horribly tangible—in wave after wave after wave.  
      
It persisted. Time stretched. He had always been in the TARDIS; he had always been at this console, unmoving, watching a world's death rattle. The vorticial angle readout had never changed, never changed, never—"Doctor! The singularity point!"  
      
"Just a little... just a few more—come on, old girl, just another—" he yanked the vector control and sent them spinning off onto Turlough's course, and Turlough tried to sigh, but he couldn't—couldn't breathe, couldn't move, had to struggle even to feel his body dying around him. Time pressed him from all sides, a weight he couldn't shake off, couldn't fight, could not endure and yet could do nothing else.  
      
...and then it was over, and the TARDIS was in wild motion, out of control, buffeted by the currents of the vortex beyond what Turlough had ever seen, and for a moment it was glorious just to be here again. He looked up and saw a spark of life flicker in the Doctor's eyes. And fade, just as quickly, as the TARDIS materialized.  
      
"Well?" said Lethbridge-Stewart. "Where are we, Doctor?"  
      
The Doctor turned on displays—absolute and relative time, fixed-point reckoning, scanner—without even looking at them. Turlough stared at the scanner display, forced himself to look away long enough to commit their coordinates to memory, before letting the carnage on the screen drag his eyes back. "Gallifrey," said the Doctor. "The Citadel. Four days after the fall of the Cruciform.  
      
"By now, President Romana has retreated to make a last stand in Rassilon's Tower, with the last of the High Council and a handful of evacuees. The Master has fled. There's nothing in the Citadel now but Daleks." And charred bodies—they lay two and three deep, on floors awash in blood. The Doctor drew a deep breath. "And me." The Doctor fixed them each with a mirror-bright stare. "I _must not_ be allowed to meet myself, is that clear? If you see a Byronic bloke in a velvet waistcoat, you do whatever it takes to keep him away from me."  
      
He patted his coat pockets mechanically. "Right. Ready?"  
      
"No," said Turlough.  
      
"No," the Doctor agreed, and opened the door.

.

The Citadel must have been a sterile environment, once; now it smelled like death in space, the stale halitus of bodies digesting in nothing but their own juices. It was its own kind of horror, to walk through blood that clung and clotted to the soles of his boots—blood crisscrossed by caster tracks, scored and harrowed like cropland—and still be breathing, not choking on putrefaction. Lethbridge-Stewart looked up and down the corridor, putting the battle—no, not a battle, an _execution—_together in his head, and probably in much better detail. Turlough was grateful he couldn't see whatever he saw. "Daleks did this?" the Brigadier whispered. "Bit... showy... for them, isn't it?"  
      
"They learned," said the Doctor. "What works. They learned." The corridor ended in a tall open space, mercifully freer of bodies. At the intersection, two corpses slumped against the corners of the wall. The Doctor planted his feet between their tangled legs and leaned out, craned his neck one way and then the other. "The Panopticon's clear—hurry," he hissed, and took off at a run. Turlough followed; he was halfway across the great room before he noticed the TARDIS, parked against a ramp from the mezzanine, squarely atop a line of bloody caster marks.  
      
The Doctor had already sprinted up the adjacent ramp; he waved from an upper gallery. "Come on!" Turlough stopped gawking and dashed after him, and Lethbridge-Stewart followed, with admirable speed for his age. He led them down a corridor empty of everything but dust; Turlough breathed it in gratefully. "You've met yourself before, Doctor," he said. "Why is it so bad if you do it again?"  
      
"Yes, I was wondering that myself," the Brigadier said.  
      
"I've met myself under the Time Lords' control." The Doctor pushed open a door, looked inside, walked on. "But it's a violation of natural law—the Blinovitch limitation effect. And of the First Law of Time, though legal penalties for that one are a bit extraneous for anyone except Time Lords."  
      
"If you're not going to explain yourself, Doctor—" the Brigadier began.  
      
"What's natural law to the Time Lords?" He tried another door, and emerged with an armload of ray guns. "Stasers. Point with this, shoot with that. Easy enough." Turlough hefted the weapon; charge lights on, and its barrel humming but still cool to the touch, very nice. The Doctor doubled back and led them down a side corridor towards a set of double doors hung with the round sigil of Rassilon. "When Gallifrey controlled the timelines, it had the power to violate that law, with impunity."  
      
It, thought Turlough. Not we. "Doesn't it still? At this point in time, I mean?"  
      
"And that's wrong, too," said the Doctor. "Even through the black hole, I shouldn't have been able to travel to Gallifrey's past. That's one restriction that was always enforced. My being here means I'm a loophole in the Time Lords' restrictions. Outside Gallifreyan influence. The universe will deal as harshly with me as with anyone else who violates the integrity of the timestreams. Remember Mawdryn's ship? Brigadier?"  
      
"Not well," he grumbled.  
      
"Exactly."  
      
"And what about the Master," the Brigadier wondered. "If he's here meddling with the—integrity of the whatever?"  
      
The Doctor laughed, one mirthless snort, and pushed open the doors. Behind them was a sort of museum, a long hall filled with glass cases. Half were broken open and despoiled. "He can't meet himself. He's already fled by now." He hunched deeper into his coat, stalking almost too fast for the rest of them to keep up. "Ignorant cowardly fool. He has no idea what he's getting into."    
      
"Oh, but I do, Doctor."

She stepped into a spotlight—she'd placed her ambush as much for dramatic effect as for tactical advantage, and yet Turlough still could not shoulder the staser fast enough; she had them all covered by her slender black compression gun. Her other hand was full of gold: a scepter and crown. A cloth-of-gold vestment draped her arm. "I know exactly what you are about to do, Doctor. And I've just stopped you."  
 

~*~

There was, in fact, a very big rock—K-T event big—docking at Platform Four, moving under its own steam. It settled into the large aft cargo cradle as the _Governor's Star _glided into visual range. "Autoimpellers?" suggested Jack. "Self-building rocket engines?"  
      
Sunny shook his head. "There's no exhaust. It's not rocket power."  
      
"Ion drive?" said Martha.  
      
"Still leaves a trail. Can you read what's inside?"  
      
"Mass readings keep shifting—might be all cut up inside for smaller ammo; rock that big would be overkill for… well, for anything."  
      
Jack steadied himself against Sunny's shoulder and peered up at the overhead readouts. The thing's center of mass was wobbling like anything, and— "Those gravitic readings can't be right."  
      
"There's no instrument error. Check the readings of the platform."  
      
"Well. That answers what's driving the thing-- gravitic impulsion. Something on board is making the strongest pinpoint gravity beam I've ever seen."  
      
_Star _swung around to the opposite side of the platform, and settled into place outside the airlock. Jack called up telemetry on the airlock screen; the rock had docked with the station umbilical, and its mass was shifting into the platform under the same gravitic impulsion—a lot of mass, moving fast.

Planetside monitoring stations, said Amyand from the ground, still showed only a single rock on the rails, and not a large one. "What about Carbry?" asked Jack.

"Cornered in a cargo lockup at the port." The connection crackled with static. "But he's threatening all sorts of mayhem if he doesn't get passage to his ship. He could mean to bombard multiple targets, I guess."    
      
"Finding that out," said Jack, and the lock cycled.  
      
Four wasn't empty; it was vibrating with activity, trembling and shuddering in every grabrail and deckplate. All the way to the control cabin, Jack kept a hand on his blaster. The crew that had unloaded the asteroid had to be here.  
      
For that matter, so did the mass they'd offloaded. The windows to the launch tube still showed only one rock on the copper rails, a squarish block about the size of a panel van.  
      
He drew his blaster and palmed the control cabin door.

It was empty. But they'd been anticipated. Every terminal that would have taken the hard shutdown sequence was smashed in.

"Oh, no," breathed Martha's voice in his ear.

"There's a secondary cabin," Jack said. "And we've got the charges, if it comes to that."

"Plant one here, then," she said.

"They're contact-activated; no remote detonation."

"Will that matter at this distance? Set off another one on the station and this one should go."

"Good thinking." Jack unhooked one from his harness and shut it into the cabin's suit locker, still in its protective casing; it spun there lazily in the null-g. He latched the locker carefully and pushed off from its door. "Come on."  

He aimed for the cabin's other door and palmed it open—and the jamb lashed out into his side; the whole station was shuddering around them, and there, just disappearing from view as the central tube went vertical outside the window, there went a mass of man-sized projectiles, ash-colored and irregular, flying down the launch chute like cricket balls from a bowler's hand.

Martha planted her magnetic boots on the wall to keep from being flung off the grabrails. "Was that a launch?"

"Sunny, report!" Those might burn up, but if that block had launched from the tube's other end—

"Launch—multiple objects, one end only—" Jack let out his breath—"shallow trajectory. In fact, any shallower and they'd skip like stones."

"Are they aerobraking?" wondered Martha. "Some kind of atmospheric contamination device?"

"They're. Jack." Sunny's voice shook. "They're putting on some kind of brake, it's glowing purple all around. Jack, they're on course to soft-land."

"Shit shit shit." Martha was already hauling herself hand-over-hand along the tube. Jack followed, fast as he could, into the docking bay. No crew, still, but the bay was scattered with chunks of iron-nickel— not many, but they'd do enough damage—and, in a line along the far wall, more of the ash-colored spheroids. "We've got more of those small projectiles," he reported. "They look like they're plated with some kind of natural ablation armor. Overlapping plates—I'm betting they unfold on landing. I'll come back to investigate if we can secure the secondary control cabin."

He swung along the grapple bars and out into the curve of the corridor again. "Push off as hard as you can, it's a straight run for a while." He took his own advice, and Martha followed. They hurtled down the corridor, past more wrecked consoles; he fought the familiar reorientation, struggling to keep the control room door 'forward' and not 'down.'

Outside the window, the central launch tube was just settling back into place for reloading. Jack grabbed a bar outside the control room door and drew his blaster; Martha, hers already drawn and primed, dropped into place boots-first and settled on the wall, peering down at the door.

"Jones, you're giving me a headache." She cocked her head without moving the helmet. "Sitting there like Spider-man," Jack clarified.

"Never thought you'd question a person's right to her own orientation, Jack."

"You are_ paying_ for that, Doctor Jones." Jack triple-checked his blaster, the explosives, the blaster again. "Let's go." He palmed the door, and they dropped into the cabin.

It was full of insects.

One of them wore a Despex collar with a small data stub plugged in, and threads snaking out into its thoracic joint. The surface of the collar moiréd as it studied them, scarlet and fuchsia. Those weren't its colors, Jack observed.

"Hi," he said. "You must be the Tractators."

They were formed up in a ragged line, with an intact control panel behind them, maybe the only one left on the platform. Martha leveled her blaster; one Tractator extended its antennae and enveloped the gun in a purple glow. It drew her toward it; she struggled, let go the gun, only to grab it again when she and the weapon kept falling in. She fired. The insect collapsed in a chitinous heap and the gravity field died, but inertia kept her falling toward the Tractator's mates. Jack shot one; Martha shot another, and then another purple field took them from behind, and their weapons were expertly pried from their hands.

The Tractator in the collar calmly put its fist through the control panel. Shit.

Sunny's voice crackled over the helmet comm." Jack, they're outside the ship." He sounded very calm about it. "They're on the wings. If I can—"

"Sunny, fire!" shouted Jack. "Fire on the station—"

"Belay that!" Martha wrenched her head against the field to glare at him. "Do you think they really need the rail gun to get planetside? What else could those projectiles have been? Break up this station around them and you'll just scatter them into a hundred orbits."

"I can't fire on anything," Sunny answered. "They're prying apart my cannon. And crawling through the exhaust ports." There was a moment of breathing, loud and shockingly intimate in Jack's ears; he struggled ineffectively against the Tractator's hold. "Maybe if I—"

The radio went to static; the station shook. "Sunny!" But the Tractators wavered, distracted, long enough for Martha to grab an explosive pack from Jack's harness and slap it on the console. The autoprimer blinked ready.

"Martha Jones, I love you." The Tractators faltered again as the one in the collar inspected the blinking lights; Jack ripped his blaster back.

The Tractator leader calmly plugged one end of his Despex lead into the console. Shit shit shit.

And Jack's blaster was dead. Of course. But it still made a good bludgeon. He cracked one Tractator across the mouth parts, pushed off with his feet from another's carapace toward the door. Martha hooked the lead Tractator's collar with her blaster muzzle and yanked, hard—it stretched, the safety coating crackling, and then the bare monofilament cut right through the blaster nose and the Tractator's neck. Recoil flung Martha in one direction and the carcass, trailing globes of ichor, in the other. The trailing end of the Despex tape pulled out of the console, and half the insects dropped back. Half kept fighting—Jack bashed in one's eye, another's underbelly. Programming versus direct control?  "Hold onto that," he shouted, and Martha tucked the collar into a thigh pocket.

They got out the door—the opposite of where they'd come in; just a quarter of the way around from their airlock. Jack knocked a Tractator's antenna off and ricocheted against the window just in time to the see the big iron-nickel block settle back onto the rails, lit on all sides by glowing green tell-tales. And then they were fighting hand-to-palp.

They battled their way to the outside lock. Through the wall, Jack thought he could feel the tick and creak of microcogs engaging. The Tractators would have to reset the stop bars, to launch the rock onto a planetbound course from this side, or else retract them long enough to flip the tube.

How long would they need? The charges were on a five-minute fuse.

Jack hand-over-handed furiously up the corridor. Martha had given up on zero-gee tactics and was running, long leaps on her magnetic boots, not the most efficient way to move, but she was more than pacing him. She reached the airlock, and Jack crawled through after, waited long seconds for it to cycle.  
   
There was no ship outside.

Jack scrabbled for a hold on the circular jamb. Martha gasped in his ear, cutting through the static. The _Governor's Star_ was a field of drifting debris.

"I don't see a life pod."

It would be hard to see, in the tumbling fragments of hull plating and steel, but—"We'd hear it first." The static hiss was the only sound besides their voices; without the _Star'_s comms, Amyand and the ground station might as well have been light-years away.

"God." Martha turned away and planted her boots on the station hull, pulled herself up to look over its edge. "Jack, the launch chute is moving."  
      
Jack got his own boots under him and peered down the orbital; the chute mouth was slowly falling away. Down the hull, the cargo pods were sliding back into place. The pods were featureless, external controls well secured, and the microcogs—he bent down to examine them—were blastproof diamond ceramic; nothing but the explosive charges would damage those.  
      
But on the sides of launch chute itself, just coming into view—there. "Secondary attitude thrusters! Come on!" He demagged his boots and pushed off in one motion, hit the falling arm in a bone-shaking bellyflop and remagged. Martha spun in above him, whirling and flailing like a pinwheel—it wasn't an easy maneuver—and snagged the hull with one foot. Jack crab-walked over the chute mouth and wrenched a thruster nozzle up from its socket with both hands. Not a design he'd ever favored—it took precious seconds to swing the launch arm around for thruster deployment—but with the arm at perpendicular, the small jets at its top and bottom could adjust the station's pitch with a very small fuel cost.  
      
Martha had the other thruster unmoored. "Where do I point it?"

"Parallel to mine. Perpendicular to the chute mouth." He wedged his body between the ceramic nozzle and its housing, jammed his boots flat against the skin plating and checked that she'd done the same. "We'll have to trigger the burn manually—there's a vent control in a recessed panel—"

"I've found it."

"On three—hold it out for four seconds, and then let it snap back. That should be enough." Whether there'd be enough fuel was another story. But it wouldn't take that long a burn to flatten the entry arc for aerobraking and burnup, if it came to that.

Martha counted three, and Jack pulled the handle. The thruster shuddered in his arms, one of the only sensations Jack had ever thought of as indecent, and the arm spun fast up to its stops on the cargo rails—and then, slowly, nudged the whole platform into a slow roll. Two seconds, three—the heat of the thruster was bleeding through; it flared, seared, sputtered to death just before four. And the planet slowly rolled away below and behind them.

Jack crawled out from the thruster housing. Martha gave him a hand up. "Ninety seconds on the charges, Jack."  

The launch doors were opening. "Then we've got a chance. Get a grip on that rock.

She was bounding over the lip and into the chute even as she protested  "But we'll be launched right out into space?"

_Hopefully. _"We're still in the ecliptic. Someone might see us. Sunny's two buddies are still out there, probably."

The rock's outside face was smooth with ablation, but the planes of cleavage were rough, and the ferrous content was high; their boot magnets clung. Jack wedged one glove deep into a pit in the cut surface and wrapped the other around Martha's waist. They waited, trying not to count the seconds.

The platform swung, reared up, and vanished behind them, so quickly that the explosion, when it came, was just another pinprick of light against the starfield, at first.

But then the fragments of the orbital caught them up, and passed them, trailing dust and volatiles across the sky. Jack caught a glimpse of the debris field smearing out behind them, a narrow ring in the making, if its orbit were stable.

Theirs wasn't. The rock tumbled precipitously over the curve of the world. Trion loomed, above them and beneath them all at once, haloed in blue and filigreed in white and prettier than it had any right to be—and then washed out, all at once, in the sudden flare of aurorae around their helmets. Jack held tighter to Martha, the only thought he had time for, before heat and light and noise engulfed him, too intense to do anything but ride it out.

And then the world was falling away, and he wasn't dead. Or worse, somehow alive after burning to nothing in reentry.

Martha leaned her faceplate against his. "Did we just skip out of atmosphere?"

"I must have miscalculated the burn." He craned his neck as much as he dared; he didn't think their angle had changed much, but then a sphere looked the same from any angle if you wrapped it in enough wispy clouds. "We might be headed out of the ecliptic."

"Jack," she said. "I'm at… two hours twenty on this oxygen canister. Plus the two reserves—just over ten hours."

"Call it closer to twenty. You can dial the flow down to alpine levels; you won't need to allow for exertion."

She clutched at the rock with her left hand as hard as the suit's gloves would let her, and carefully snaked her right up to the screw at her neck. Jack clutched her tight round the waist while she cranked it down; he could hear the first warning click, faintly, through her faceplate. "Even so. That's just one day to wait for rescue. We don't know whether either of Sunny's friends made it. And if they didn't, how long until they can get a ship up from the spaceport? If they even think to look, with the_ Star _and the orbital gone?"

"If nothing else, we've got value as hostages," said Jack tightly. Trion was noticeably smaller already. "They'll look."

"If nothing's happened to Amyand and Daine. I doubt they'd have let on to the chain of command that they sent the alien hostages on an EVA mission." Jack could barely see her through the faceshield mirror, just a faint overlay of her face on his own distorted features.

"Don't." said Jack. "Someone will know; once they get Carbry's little controller away from him, someone will ask about us. We were guests of the Turlough of Turlough."

"And we know where he is," she muttered, but she subsided a bit against the rock, relaxing enough to spread her fingers and stretch them. The asteroid was still radiating heat from its brief dip into the mesosphere. "Jack," she ventured, "what's going to happen to you? When our air runs out?"

He'd been contemplating the same thing, and there really was only one solution. It wasn't a good one. "Asphyxia is nothing," he said, as cheerily as he could. "I spent two thousand years dying of it once. As long as I was unconscious when I died, I stayed that way when I came back. Mostly."

"Mostly?"

He couldn't shrug in the hardsuit. "But when they dug me up—"

"When they _what?—_"

"—I was_ fine,_ once I got some air in my lungs." He couldn't help taking a deep breath, though he knew he needed to conserve his breath. "So the best chance, for both of us, is for you to turn off my oxygen now. You may need it."

She nodded inside her helmet. She'd already thought of it, Jack realized. He wondered, morbidly, how long it would have taken her to suggest it. Not long, he thought, and in that moment he loved her fiercely.

"Go ahead." She pressed her eyes and her mouth tight shut—tears were bad news in a helmet— and then helped wedge his gloves against the rock on either side of her, let him dig his fingers into the pitted slag and plant his feet as flat as they would go. When he was holding as tight as he could, she slung one arm back around his neck and twisted the knob.

"Hold on, Jack." The regulator clicked, clicked again, louder and louder as the faint hiss of air died down to nothing.

Without the circulators going, his next breath fogged his helmet. The next didn't quite fill his lungs. He tried not to gasp—easiest to let his own CO2 quietly poison him—but it was impossible not to choke a little.

His breath was white in his face, and his heartbeat roared in his ears, and his pulse beat everywhere against his skin. He choked on laughter. "Priapism," he explained; four syllables took all the breath he had. "Never get to enjoy—"  Carbon dioxide still conducted sound; he heard Martha's laugh. And then at last his vision narrowed in, white faceplate receding to a point of white light.


	24. Chapter 24

"Master." The Doctor offered the name as a supplication; she smiled, but her face did not soften. "Master, do you know what's going to happen?"  
      
"I'm going to reopen negotiations with the Daleks," she said. "I'm going to save Gallifrey. And then, I'm going to rule it.  
      
"And don't think I've forgotten my other self, already stuck in a trinket at the end of the universe," she added. "Events will unfold as they should. I can't stop you jilting your gallant Captain Harkness—oh, he told me the whole dreary story. Everything else falls out from that. You delivered me this body when you abandoned his."  
      
The Doctor was ashen. "What are you going to offer them?" He meant it, thought Turlough. He really thought she might pull this off.  
      
"Dominion, Doctor." She pressed the scepter to her heart, and now her smile did soften. "Dominion of the timelines, under my command."  
      
"No." The Doctor had let his staser arm fall. Turlough hadn't. He hit the trigger; the weapon shrank in his hand and fell, target of a well-aimed burst from the Master's compression gun. The Brigadier had his staser up—but the Master still had them covered. Standoff.  
      
"I won't kill you, Doctor." She said it as though it hardly needed saying, and Turlough supposed that after so many centuries, it didn't. "You will watch my triumph. Perhaps I shall offer you a place on my Council." From down the corridor came a faint noise, a nightmarish, familiar hum and whir; Turlough's muscles froze into vigilance at the sound. Despina's smile turned cold again. "If you can negotiate a truce with my new allies, that is." Weapon still raised, she backed toward a cabinet along the wall—no. A TARDIS. It slid a green doorway open at her approach. "Until next time, Doctor."  
      
The Doctor leapt after her—what did she expect, telling him outright she wouldn't shoot—and got hold of the gold vestment. They struggled in the doorway; Turlough dodged a shot, and Despina lost an epaulette to the Brigadier's bolt. And then the Daleks were around them, coming in from left and right, blaring "Halt! Halt! Halt!"  
      
Despina abandoned the golden stole; the TARDIS door pulled shut after her, and the capsule dematerialized. The Doctor reeled, off balance, straight between the two columns of Daleks. "I am halting! See me, halting, here?"

The Daleks silenced, just for a moment, and the Doctor took the floor and shouted at them. "Do you know me?" The Daleks circled, six of them; the Doctor paced the circled, looking one by one into each eyestalk. "I'm the Doctor. The Oncoming Storm." There was a whir of thought, and the circle tightened. The Doctor met the Brigadier's eyes and gestured him back with his chin; Turlough had already scuttled between two white-carapaced Daleks. Neither stopped him; every eyestalk was pointed straight at the Doctor. "Destroy me, and you destroy Gallifrey's last hope. I dare you to do it. Right now, put an end to it. I dare you!"

One did. The Doctor flung himself to the floor; the Dalek opposite burst into flames, shedding sparks onto Turlough's shoulders. Turlough jumped another's eyestalk from behind; it caught fire in his arms as Lethbridge-Stewart shot down one, two, four Daleks in quick succession. The Doctor rescued the gold stole from the ring of smoking carapaces. "Right, that's this lot." He dusted himself off. "There'll be more. Come on."

Not even a thank you; Lethbridge-Stewart rolled his eyes, behind the Doctor's back. "Where?"

The Doctor led them down another warren of corridors before answering. Twice, they dodged Dalek patrols. Once, they stumbled across another cache of bodies, stacked like cordwood against the walls. Turlough's gorge had started to rise before the shooting even began; he swallowed down bile.     

The Doctor waited a long time outside the last door, listening with his ear pressed to the metal. His face was drawn, hopeless. "I think it's clear," he whispered. "Come on."

The room was ovoid, tiered, and mercifully free of corpses. And intact, though it was clearly a control center of some sort—consoles ringed the walls, and the domed ceiling was a swirling vortex diagram, overlaid with starmaps. "What is this place?" said the Brigadier.  
      
"And how did it survive?" wondered Turlough.  
      
"Temporal observatory." The Doctor didn't answer Turlough's question. "This is where the Time Lords kept watch on the timelines. All of them. We can track the Master's interference from here."  
      
"Track," repeated the Brigadier. "Not change?"  
      
The Doctor's jaw twitched. "That's not what this place was designed for."  
      
"What about the Daleks?" said Turlough.  
      
"Even the Daleks can't break a bio-timeline lock," said the Doctor. "The Lady President of the High Council locked this room down herself, when she retreated." He tapped commands into a console; vortex displays lit up in swirls before the starmap.  
      
"So how did we get in?"  
      
The Doctor hefted the gold bundle. "Presidential regalia—the Sash of Rassilon."  
      
Lethbridge-Stewart frowned at that. "Shouldn't the presidential regalia have been evacuated with the president?"  
      
The Doctor flicked switches, one after another; displays crowded each other, until one whorled mass of color began to edge out the others. "It was left here for me. To use, if I had to."  

A man took shape in the center of the large vortex. Velvet waistcoat and poet shirt—this would be the Doctor's Byronic self. "Pretty," Turlough observed.

"Lot of good it did me." He watched himself thread the corridors of the Citadel. The corpses behind him looked fresher. The Doctor shook his head, casting off some private reverie. "Brigadier," he snapped—sharp, almost military; all business. "Remember Omega? The antimatter universe?"

"What about it, Doctor?"  
      
"That universe was the source of Gallifrey's power. It opened into our universe through a black hole called the Eye of Harmony. The presidential regalia of the Time Lords controlled that black hole." He shrugged. "Or did once. This old thing's been broken for millennia." He tossed the Sash of Rassilon onto a chair—gently, though. "But they worked well enough to open that gateway—let a wave of anti-time into our universe. And focus it." He shrugged, one muscle at a time, like a marionette. "Of course, unleashing all those energies... tears the planet apart. Gallifrey, and all its works; everything powered by the Eye."  
      
On the display, the Doctor had reached the great open room—the Panopticon. His mouth was set, but his eyes darted this way and that, as if unwilling to burn any sight into his memory. "Is that what... he... does? Is going to do?"       
      
"Not anymore." Of course; the Master had stolen the rest of the regalia.  
      
"Then what _is_ happening, Doctor?" demanded Lethbridge-Stewart. "Now that the Master's absconded with the—"  
      
"—with the Rod and Key of Rassilon, and the Circlet of the Matrix."  
      
"Yes, those. If he's taken them, in your past, shouldn't you remember what you did without them?"    
      
That got through the Doctor's mask; he frowned, considering. "That's a good point. Unless..." He ignored the dome full of vortex displays and began calling up simple, fixed-point views of the Citadel. "There'll be a paradox machine somewhere. There'll have to be—the Master said it himself: I have to be free to go to Utopia and find him. That doesn't happen unless I leave Jack on the game station, and _that_ doesn't happen unless the Daleks take me by surprise. Unless I think—I know—that they're gone."  
      
"She's created a temporal paradox? Locked her own timeline into it?" Turlough was no expert, but that sounded rather dangerous.  
      
"She must have." Screens flickered: corridors, rooms, plazas, covered in dust and wreckage, and, here and there, with blood.

In one of them, something moved.  "Doctor. Is this real-time?"

"Effectively. It's got to be here."

"Isn't that the corridor outside?"

The Doctor flicked back, just in time to catch a flutter of sleeves in the corner of the shot. "No. No, no, no no no—"  The door opened. The Doctor stumbled back, interposing Turlough between himself and... himself.

The other Doctor locked the door behind him. "What are you doing here? This section was evacuated." His eyes fell on the Sash and narrowed; he looked from himself, to Turlough, to Lethbridge-Stewart, with dawning recognition. "You can't be—Turlough? Brigadier?" He looked into his own face and turned gray. "I have to live with it?"

Turlough's Doctor—his other Doctor—the later Doctor nodded, minutely. "Not in that body," he said, gently.

"Well, that's a relief," the newcomer choked out a gallows laugh. "For how _long? _How long do I...?"

"I don't know."

"No, of course you wouldn't. I don't—" he sighed, and his eyes went bleak and lost. "I don't want to know if gets better. Seems almost obscene." That made the Doctor flinch, but he didn't argue. "And speaking of obscenities, I repeat my original question—what are you _doing _here? Not, of course, that it isn't lovely to see you again, Turlough, Alastair."

"Sir Alastair now," said the Doctor.

"Is it? Well, that's long overdue. Congratulations—and am I always this evasive?"

"Perennially," muttered Lethbridge-Stewart.

"I followed the Master."  The Doctor's lips froze mid-invective. "He came back, to undo what—we—did. He's built a paradox machine somewhere, he must have; I can't find it—"

"The Prydonian tower. Our old staircase; I saw the power drain, but I didn't follow it; the base of the tower is crawling with Daleks."

"It has to be destroyed."

"Naturally. And by you. I have..."

"Other things to do," his later self finished, and the older Doctor huffed in agreement, another breathless morbid laugh. "I'll need backup. Will you—do you need any help?"

The strange Doctor looked from Turlough to Lethbridge-Stewart. "Alastair, I hate to send you into danger, but unless you've taken a few advanced physics degrees since we last met, I don't think you have Turlough's technical expertise."

"Well, I don't have the Brigadier's marksmanship," said Turlough. "So that settles that."

The wartime Doctor—oh, that was better; _early _and _late _were futile concepts with Time Lords, and _old _and _young _were even worse—the wartime Doctor rifled through a drawer and came up with communicator wristbands for all of them. He let the others pass them down the line to the postwar Doctor, keeping the whole of the room between them. Lethbridge-Stewart and the Doctor fastened their communicators on, took both stasers, and left. The Doctor glanced at Turlough, too brief and too dead a look to know if he meant _Good luck_, or _I'm sorry,_ or anything else. He didn't even meet his own eyes.

And then the wartime Doctor pulled out a chair for Turlough and poured the Sash of Rassilon into his lap. "Parts of this are irreparable," he said, "but there's a vorticial bubble manipulator that might be salvageable. How are your vortex bubbles these days?"

"As good as they ever were."

"Excellent." He sat down opposite and stretched the Sash between them, like some Time Lord parody of a quilting bee. "When are 'these days' for you, anyway? You look about a decade out of sync with Alastair." He opened a panel in the sash and unrolled a toolkit from some hidden pocket.

"That's about right," said Turlough. "I've been living on Trion; I lost twelve years."

"Oh, yes, I suppose you must have. Here, strip these synoptic links and test the chronotic conduction." He gestured at the tools, and took a set of zeus plugs for himself. "Do you like it on Trion?" he said, as though it were any time for small talk. "I always meant to come back and visit."

"Then why _didn't _you?" The question he'd been sitting on since Despina's audience chamber finally ripped out of him—to the wrong Doctor, but that was just it, wasn't it—there was no right Doctor; they were all the same man, all of him. "I wouldn't have cared what you did to the Master. I wouldn't have cared about anything you'd done. _Any_ of it." He gestured with his free hand to the Observatory, the Citadel. Gallifrey. The Doctor's face was slowly falling. "None of that would have mattered, if I'd just known that you—remembered me," he finished. "Thought of me." And maybe all Doctors were the same man, but it was still easier, cravenly so, demanding this answer from the Doctor he hadn't slept with.  

"I did come back, though!" protested the Doctor. "I mean, I must have—didn't I?" _Not by choice._  "I know I always meant to. I did think about you, from time to time. Fondly, even, if that makes a difference."

And it did, that was the devil of it. "I know you did. It just—I suppose it's hard for you to remember, how fast time seems to pass outside the TARDIS." He plugged the chronotometer into another link; how long had this thing gone without maintenance, anyway? "So, what about you, Doctor?" he said, since apparently this_ was_ a time for small talk. "Traveling with anyone these days?"

The Doctor's face closed down. "Not anymore."

Well. That was awkward. They worked the next while in silence.

~*~

The flight was still too short for sleep. Colonel Mace had recalled them to England after another day, with maddeningly elliptical references to new developments. Sarah Jane's heart sank when they got the message—if the Doctor were in trouble, if he'd turned up with another life stripped away, or worse, Mace would be vague about it. And if anything had happened to Sir Alastair...  She strapped into her seat on the plane, almost wishing for a reason to stay in Paris a few days.

But there was none; Carnot's men would be weeks rooting the last Tractator nests out of the sewers, but they had it in hand; and meanwhile, the Louvre was secure, and testing—both mandatory and voluntary—for Despex contamination was proceeding without a hitch, with commercial laboratories throughout Europe turning out the testing medium.

And Sarah Jane had certainly been scooped on anything she'd had to say about the runway shows, though she tried desultorily to write up her notes en route.

Captain Price met them on the tarmac herself, but she seemed more pleased than anything else, and sent them all on home with orders for Patel's men—and a request, to Sarah and Ianto—to come back at eight hundred. Sarah went straight home, and straight up to the attic. "Mr. Smith, report. Twenty words or less if you can, I'm tired."

She fancied the computer paused longer than usual. "Ship made lunar dock ninety minutes prior to Despex runway show. Tremors then resumed simultaneously at known Tractator nests."

"...Mr. Smith, were those haiku?"

"If you prefer another format—"

"No, thank you. Just let me think." That ship must have been the Master, arriving from wherever the transmat had taken Lucy Saxon. Arriving, and signaling the Tractators; if he—she—were Saxon, were Norman, then they'd been her creatures from the start. So she had something else planned for them. A method of return? Or of destruction—both the scorched-earth retreat, and shaking the planet apart in a fit of pique, were consistent with the Master's methods.

"You've been monitoring UNIT channels?"

"Yes, Sarah Jane."

"Have you picked up any communications from that ship? Or the lunar base?"

"Tightbeam transmissions not utilizing satellite networks may have been uninterceptable; however, I can confirm that no Despex manufacturing or corporate site received such a transmission. But the ship did tap into commercial telecommunications systems to receive encrypted transmissions from the London warehouse site for eight minutes following docking. It subsequently sent a single encrypted reply." He brought up displays of bandwidth, information density— the Master's reply had been brief indeed, probably no more than a few lines of text.

"So either the signal to make the Tractators dig is very simple. Or, it's stored elsewhere, and the Master just set some automated contingency plans going." In either case, if this was going on at every Despex site, the signal didn't depend on the human controllers; most of them were in UNIT custody by now. "All right, let me know if you hear another peep from that ship. Incoming or outgoing. How's Luke?"

"Well, at last report."

"Good." It was too late to go get him from Clyde's— though as soon as she'd thought it, she knew that was untrue. Selfish, even, to want another night to herself—

No, not that. To prefer another night of worrying, of telling herself that he was just fine and didn't need her, over seeing him in all his youth and strangeness and having to face how much he _did_ need her. And that she'd turned down the Doctor and the wild risk he'd offered her again, not out of cowardice or anything else she could blame on herself, but out of true and inarguable need. Luke's need.

Oh, and that was cowardly. But. It wouldn't hurt to knock around the empty house until its emptiness really sank in. "I'll text him, tell him to come back before school tomorrow."

.

And in the morning, Luke was even taller than when she'd left, she swore, and starving even though she'd known Clyde had fed him breakfast, and she could hug him and feed him and tell him what little she knew about where Sir Alastair and the TARDIS had gone, and remember that she loved him—that she was _invested_ in him, in being there for him— much more than she resented him.  
      
And that was really too much soul-searching before she'd had her tea, especially once Mr. Smith reported a worrying energy buildup on the lunar base. Sarah Jane arrived at UNIT HQ out of sorts, and her mood was not improved by hearing that the briefing wasn't until ten. "So what am I here for?"  
      
"You're wanted in Medical," said the corporal at Reception.  
      
Medical could be good, or could be very bad. Sarah Jane followed voices through the ward, relieved to see it empty, and broke into a grin as she saw Harry and Laura Wheare conferring happily over an MRI image.  
      
"Have you found a cure, then?" She stood on tiptoe to peer over Harry's shoulder at the screen, but it was meaningless without the original scans for comparison.  
      
"That's what we hope to find out," said Harry. "Could you stand by the door for a moment, old girl?"  
      
"Wait a moment. You're not bringing another of those things in—oh, for heaven's sake." Two technicians led the captive Tractator in, heavy restraints around its carapace. "Harry, I've seen enough giant insects in the last forty-eight hours for the rest of my life." But it was the final test, she supposed, grabbing onto the counter for dear life as the Tractator wrapped her in its gravitic field. Laura, poor long-suffering Laura, gamely inched closer and closer to the trapped animal, until the purple glow haloed her.  
      
"Nothing," she said. "Nothing at all. I can feel it pulling at me, but that's it." She let out a sigh that took years off her face. "The programming's gone."  
      
Tests backed her up—the Tractator's gravitic signals had had no effects they could measure. Harry gladly signed off on Laura's release, and wrote up the formula for the treatment—blessedly simple—and the instructions. "It does need physician oversight," he said. "That's the one real drawback—one shot starts the breakdown of the embedded Despex beads, and that's enough to break the program, but there are still some very real possibilities for complications until the substance is completely out of the system. Kidneys, mostly."  
      
"I will drink plenty of water," Laura promised.  
      
Harry's good news was the highlight of the briefing. They still didn't know what the Tractators were doing with their new excavations, or how to stop them; and they didn't know the cause of the new energy signature at the lunar base, though Mace had found it worrying enough to send a team up—Sergeant Patel had requested the honor—through the warehouse transmat to investigate.

The groundside station monitoring their activity caught another signal as well: radar pulses from the lunar base, edging more and more precisely toward the centers of the Tractator activity on Earth.

"Purpose?" barked Mace into the intercom.

The technician's shrug was almost audible. "I think they're trying to focus some sort of energy pulse into the Tractator excavations."

"The purpose of the _energy pulse._"

No one had more than speculation, but some of the speculation was chilling. "It's possible," said Mace's chief researcher, "given what we know of the Tractators' ability to manipulate energy fields, that a series of energy pulses directed right through these tunnels might just break Earth out of its orbit."

Mace was the first to find his voice. "On what trajectory?"

"Well, that would depend on the timing," the woman said, hedging. "There are any number of possibilities."

"Back," ventured Sarah, "along the route of the Master's ship?"

"That's one of them."

"Why then, don't you see? She's going to send the whole Earth to her other base. To Trion. Filled with Tractators."  
      
"That's mere speculation—" the research chief began, but Mace was already on the comms. "Patel, did you get that? Find that emitter, and put it out of commission."  
      
"We've found the emitter, sir," came Patel's voice, at a whisper. "There's six men in there with it. Armed."

"That may be all there are," Sarah offered. "Turlough—the Doctor's companion—said the ship was lightly guarded." At least if he'd recognized her from Gallifrey, it must be Turlough the schoolboy, grown up now; and it was easier to give him a name than to keep calling him 'the Doctor's companion.' Easier on two counts, she thought, though not so bitterly this time.

"Whoever they are," said Mace, "they're working for the Master. If they won't surrender, assume mind-control protocol three." Non-lethal methods, but not to the point of spending UNIT lives.

The attack, when it came, was brief and effective. "Patel, sir. Five hostiles disarmed and restrained, one killed. No UNIT fatalities, two injured—stun beam, and Jameson has electrical burns, but she's walking." Mace had medics standing by at the warehouse, and security; he had the injured and the prisoners transmatted back. Patel and a few others stayed long enough to verify the base—and the Master's ship with it—was secure for the technical team, and followed them back.  
      
But the technical team was still mustering—UNIT's best experts on gravitics were investigating Tractator diggings at the Despex plant in Hyderabad—and the ship was forgotten under more pressing worries, chief among them the problem of the Master's captured men. They spoke only an alien language, presumably Trion, definitely not one UNIT already knew. The field linguists had started on elicitation, or tried to, but reported the Trions totally uncooperative—and likely to stay that way, as they'd all tested negative for Despex contamination. The Master's ordinary mind-control couldn't be spread so indiscriminately as the Despex programming, but it couldn't be broken with an injection, either. And, as Sarah Jane reminded Mace, it could just be plain garden-variety loyalty—and that was incurable.

Sarah went home to consult unnamed sources. Mr. Smith did not have a Trion language module. He did have a set of maps compiled from ground-penetrating radar scans of the Tractator excavations, and confirmed that their patterns, labyrinthine and circuit-like, were similar to known models for gravitic engine baffles. "Though I have never seen a gravitic baffle engine constructed on a planetary scale."

A light blinked on his console. "Sarah Jane. The ship in lunar dock is receiving a real-time subspace pulse from Trion. Would you like me to cut in its onboard translation circuits?

"Translation circuits? Do you mean to say you can get into the Trion ship's controls?"

"No, Sarah Jane; the Trion communications system offered to patch me in when it came online and detected my monitoring."

Sarah Jane raised her estimation of Trion technology several notches. "All right, then. Tell the Trions yes, we'd love to talk to them."

The Trions turned out to be one severely-dressed young woman with dimples like Jennifer Ehle's. "Trion presidential gig," she said, her lips out-of-synch with the sound; not _quite _so high-tech, then. "You are broadcasting a compromise signal; please explain your circumstances.

"Patel's team must have triggered something," muttered Sarah—out of the audio pickup, she'd thought, but the woman went on. "If I am addressing a representative of the planet Earth, please identify yourself. Repeat, please identify."

"I'm Sarah Jane Smith." And not exactly a representative of Earth, but she could let that slide for the moment.

"My name is Attris Daine," said the Trion. "On behalf of the Trion League, I request the extradition of Miss Despina Norman, last seen on your planet." She didn't clarify her rank, or her authority to make the request, any more than Sarah Jane had. She'd called the ship the presidential gig—just what had the Master been up to on Trion?

"First tell me about two Earth citizens, last known on Trion—Captain Jack Harkness, and Doctor Martha Jones."

"Alive and well," she said. "They are being held in protective custody as witnesses to certain of Miss Norman's crimes, but once they have given their statements, we will be happy to negotiate with Earth authorities for their release." She smiled, dimpling sweetly. "Perhaps in exchange for Miss Norman herself."

This was the point at which Colonel Mace would call Geneva, and Geneva would call in... everyone, really.

Right. Colonel Mace wasn't here. "I'm afraid Despina Norman has already left the planet. Through a spatiotemporal anomaly opened up by captive Tractator drones." A minute flinch crossed Daine's face at the word _Tractator—_good; they'd had their own problems with them. "But we have five of her crew in custody here, apprehended trying to attack the planet's surface with an energy pulse. We'd be happy to let you take them off our hands. In exchange for Jones and Harkness, say." She had a momentary thought for what might await the men if they were mind-controlled, innocents, and squelched it; they could deal with that later. They could deal with the Despex-contamination treatment later, too; keep that in reserve, in case the Trions needed something to sweeten the pot.

But after a moment's thought, Daine nodded. "We accept." Well. That was an excellent start. "As for Miss Norman's ship, that too is required for our investigations. We can of course send a crew, but if you prefer to speed matters and return it yourself, that is also quite acceptable."

And this, thought Sarah, was where to call in UNIT. "Miss Daine, do you mind if I get back to you on that?"

Colonel Mace accepted her story that the Trions had been the ones to contact her—it was more or less true, after all—but was not at all pleased she'd made a deal before speaking to Jack and Martha. Sarah Jane stuck to her guns: better to go in quickly, and bring out the contamination treatment if the Trions balked—or after they had their people back—than to drag this out while Jack and Martha were prisoners and the Master was who knew where. "And what else would you have us do with the Trions," she asked, angling the webcam pickup to get her face and nothing else. "Hand them to Torchwood to lock up forever?" Ianto, who'd come straight to Sarah's attic on getting the news, pursed his lips; Mace, in teleconference, did much the same, but neither offered a better idea. "Now we can at least get things rolling. We've even got permission to fly out in their own ship. Not that permission helps, obviously."

"Why not?" Luke, back from school—early, what on earth?— had materialized in the doorway. And Clyde, and Rani. Of course.

"Luke, this is classified. Close the door and go downstairs. What are you doing here at this hour, anyway?"

"Water main burst," explained Clyde. "No aliens, though; we checked it out."

"Derek Marley flushed a firecracker."

"Fine, go downstairs and clean up the water you tracked in. I don't need to have seen it," she said, cutting off Luke's protest.

"Is this the spaceship on the moon?" Luke hadn't budged. "That wouldn't be hard to fly. We've been monitoring it." He cocked his head at Mr. Smith. "We've got schematics for the power and guidance systems, and there's still an ion trail leading back the way it came."

"Smith, I can pull your clearances at any time." Mace was a rather disturbing color.

"My son is leaving, now." She turned away from the camera; nothing was more futile than a staring contest over webcam, except possibly a staring contest over _secure_ webcam. The children retreated—an orderly retreat, not a rout, Sarah noted with some trepidation.

"Torchwood does have records on a number of alien spacecraft designs," offered Ianto, too low for the mike to pick up.

And once it had been thought, it couldn't be unthought, no matter how many dangers Sarah brought up, and how much Mace dug in his heels. They could just _fly to another planet._ They could fly away and _rescue their people. _It was a dizzying notion.

The Doctor, thought Sarah, must feel like this _all the time._


	25. Chapter 25

The modifications to the Sash didn't take long; the Doctor seemed to take his time checking Turlough's work, but soon enough he reached the end of what he could do. He folded the Sash in his lap and folded his hands on top of it, and searched Turlough's expression as though he wanted to say something, but didn't know how to begin. Or had been dissuaded, by Turlough's earlier outburst.  
      
Or maybe that was just projection on Turlough's part. "Are we waiting for the Doctor's signal?" he asked. "The other Doctor, that is."  
      
"No." Turlough waited; apparently all the Doctors dealt in long pauses. "I'm waiting for Romana." The Lady President; another traveler in the Doctor's TARDIS, whom Turlough had heard about only thirdhand. He had wished, from time to time, that he'd been able to tell Peri everything he'd heard about his predecessors—about Tegan, and Nyssa; and about Adric, who'd traveled with them, and Romana who'd traveled with him—to keep some institutional memory in the TARDIS, or at least some memory less scattered and distractible than the Doctor's.    
      
Though not any more accurate; Turlough had heard Romana was lost forever in exospace, and here she was president of Gallifrey. "She was to signal me, once the Tower was secure. If the stand was successful. If I don't hear..."  
      
"The Doctor never got that signal," said Turlough. "The one I came with, I mean."  
      
"And he never met himself, either," snapped the Doctor. "I can't just blindly follow his timeline. For all I know, I'm to avert his future." He looked up at the screens. "I should call up a view of the Dark Tower."    
      
The Doctor was more afraid than he was. Well, of course he was; to Turlough, and to Turlough's postwar Doctor, Gallifrey's destruction was history, a thing over and done with. To this Doctor, it could still be averted—and if it couldn't, the responsibility would be his.  
      
"If you do avert his future—" began Turlough. _If you can save Gallifrey..._  
      
"Oh, you'll be back on Trion where he picked you up. Safe and sound—assuming you were safe and sound on Trion, that is. I mean, I hope you were."  
      
Turlough felt himself blushing, but he supposed he must be that transparent to all the Doctors after his own. Or his first, though that was a rather unsavory way to put it. "What happens to the other Doctor?" he said.  
      
"He'd still come along, eventually," said the Doctor. "In fact he'd probably be here now, still fighting Daleks. The stand at the Tower... won't end this war." He looked up at the screens again, eyes bleak, and angrily flicked a switch: and there it was, familiar from Turlough's last visit to Gallifrey—Rassilon's Tower, with its black battlements burnt to slag.  
      
"Can you see inside?"  
      
The Doctor's hand hovered. He swallowed hard, and brought up a bank of displays. They all showed the identical image: a woman, not tall, dwarfed before a massive sepulcher. Her hair was the same color as the age-pitted stone, a blond going to gray; her oval face looked like Despina's, or like what Despina would age into. Armed men and women fell back around her, interposing themselves between her body and the tightening ring of Daleks. No one in the room looked like a soldier.  
      
The Doctor's eyes had finally begun to stream; but under the tears, his face had hardened. "It's everywhere," he said. He cycled image after image to the front. "The real-time view in every timeline—_every_ one. This is all there is."  
      
"Even the Master's?" Turlough said, and felt stupid for asking; this woman was his rival on too many fronts to even think he'd leave her alive.  
      
"I can't _find_ the Master's. Not a month down the timelines, not one year, not five—"  
      
"Um. He is female now. Looks rather like the Lady President, actually."  
      
"Really?" The Doctor sounded more amused than surprised. "I wish you could tell me that story. And—but, no, this is still your timeline, still the _only _timeline." But he'd found Despina, in a TARDIS console room piled around every wall with hecatombs of machinery and data media: she lay fetal on the floor, teeth bared, face contorted in defeat and rage.  
      
"Perhaps—perhaps she failed because the Doctor destroys her paradox machine?"  
      
"Perhaps." He stole a glance at the view from the Tower; Romana's guards were fewer, by half at least.  
      
"What—" Turlough's voice broke; he couldn't even be a proper distraction. "What are those things in the TARDIS with her?"  
      
"Half the treasures of Rassilon," the Doctor said, absently. "Matrix data extracts, a genetic loom, TARDIS seed medium—a solar gravitic vorticizer, good lord."  
      
"Could he—could he rebuild Gallifrey with all that?"  
      
"No." A world of finality in that syllable. "But he could still build quite a world with it. Supply it with power. Populate it, even." He gave a speculative sort of laugh. "Wonder if the Rani made it out."    
      
On the screen, the Master wailed, dry-eyed. Turlough's communicator chimed in unison with the Doctor's. "We've done it. And found the service lift still working, no less." The doors opened, and there were Lethbridge-Stewart and the Doctor. "It was right where you said it'd be," the postwar Doctor continued, sounding anything but triumphant.  He called an image to the fore of the ceiling displays: a red-lit room with a wicked-looking clot of machinery smoking blackly at its center. "What do the timeline displays say?"  
      
"Nothing's changed." The Master still keened; Romana held a staser butt squarely to her shoulder and set her jaw. "_Nothing._ As though there's only been one timeline here all the while."  
      
"As though—" said Turlough. "You mean there _was_ no paradox?"  
      
"There must have been. The Master—"  
      
"The Master was wrong." The wartime Doctor waved a hand at the displays without looking. "He was wrong, and so were you, Doctor."  
      
"That's not—he stole the Regalia! The Rod, the Key— are they back in the museum?"  
      
The Doctor looked. "Empty cases, broken glass. There's—no, hold on. _That's_ the branching point? That's how he planned to stop me? I mean, I won't deny they'd have made things easier, but with Turlough's help tuning up the Sash, I ought to be able to make do."  
      
"But—" the Doctor backed into a console and let it take his weight, looking as lost as the wartime Doctor had before. "But I _remember—_ do you mean _nothing's_ changed?"  
      
The wartime Doctor dug his fingers into the gold of the Sash. "Doctor, what exactly do you remember?"  
      
Lethbridge-Stewart harrumphed quietly, but forbore to point out he'd asked much the same thing an hour ago. The Doctor chewed his lip. "I remember standing in front of the cases in the museum."  
      
His other self nodded. "Go on."  
      
"I remember the Eye opening. Staring into it. I remember the power running through me, through my hands. Like leaning from the prow of a solar-atmosphere cutter. Only cold, burning cold. Or else so hot that my own body seemed to freeze in comparison. I remember touching—touching the Eye. Space and time unfolding, rolling out through me. And I looked down the Timelines, and the Daleks fell. It all... fell." And that was the face the Doctor had been hiding from him all this time. From all of them.  
      
He'd never said it, Turlough realized. Any of it.  
      
"And when I woke up in the TARDIS, half-dead, half-frozen, wrapped up in Fitz's bloody jacket, I did my best to forget it all. Because it was that, or go mad. Satisfied?"  
      
The wartime Doctor said nothing, only turned back to the displays. In the Dark Tower, Daleks thronged the corridors. Hundreds of Daleks, thousands. Romana and half a dozen old men and women, blood-smeared, calmly paced down one long vault, methodically firing on the tombs until circuitry appeared, and burnt, and ran down the stone in runnels. She glanced up at every video feed she passed, mouthing words Turlough did not need to hear to understand: _Now, Doctor! Now, Doctor! Now, Doctor!_  
      
"Do you remember this?" said the Doctor quietly.  
      
The postwar Doctor shook his head. "No. No. No."  
      
"Good." The wartime Doctor swallowed. "Then I won't either." He threw the Sash over his head and went to the door. "My TARDIS. It's time."  
      
He walked ahead of them for the first corridor, and scrubbed his face with his hands, heedless of Dalek patrols. When he let them catch him up, his voice was thick. "Doctor. What do you remember of the Vardan invasion?"  
      
The postwar Doctor answered lightly enough, though he looked about the way his counterpart sounded. "Mostly what Borusa told me afterward." He stumbled, reached out as if to grab the other Doctor by the sleeves, and at the last minute latched onto Lethbridge-Stewart's shoulder instead. "Of course. Of _course—_you have the Great Key! That's why we both remember the regalia case at the museum; that's how you got into the Observatory—well, the regalia doesn't really get more presidential than—"  
      
"Doctor," the Brigadier broke in, "would an explanation be too much to ask?"  
      
The two Doctors looked at each other; the wartime Doctor took the floor after a complicated exchange of nods. "Quite some time ago—before your time, Turlough— Gallifrey was invaded by a race that could travel along electromagnetic wavelengths. Full telepaths, very nasty people. I drove them off, or so I'm told, with a weapon of Rassilon's—one so nasty it induces retrograde amnesia in anyone who builds it. Or maybe just uses it, I suppose they wouldn't have to go together."  
      
"Well, that's—" the Brigadier's eyes narrowed mid-roll. "Actually, something like that might have quite a boon to UNIT opsec, back in the day. The Official Secrets Act just wasn't written to cover some things..."  
      
"The de-mat gun," the postwar Doctor said, "removes matter not just from space, but from time; it obliterates it utterly. The Council suggested rebuilding it early in the war; in fact I think they did do. But what's the point of taking an individual Dalek, or even a Dalek warship, out of spacetime? There are always more where it came from—thousands more. Even if you could destroy Skaro—well, again, or earlier I suppose—they're hidden away in spacetime pockets, building and rebuilding—you couldn't ever hope to hold them off that way. The anti-time effect was the only—the only way to win."  
      
The wartime Doctor took a deep breath. "Yes," he said. "It is."  
      
It meant nothing to Turlough, but after a moment the postwar Doctor's eyes went wide. "The Eye of Harmony," he said. "You're going to couple the de-mat effect to a stream of anti-time—propagate it backward along the timestream."  
      
The wartime Doctor stopped where he stood, old blood smeared around his feet. "Yes."  
      
The Doctor's eyes were white-ringed, almost panicked. "You do realize, if that works, you'll almost certainly wipe out the Kaled race as well?"  
      
"I know."  
      
"That it has an even chance of exterminating their cousins the Thals—a gentle people who have never been anything but friends to us?"  
      
The wartime Doctor let out a deep breath. "I know."  
      
The Doctor shook his head, eyes squeezed shut—remembering? Or merely realizing what he had done, what he must have done, and mourning it for the first time?  
      
His counterpart's voice brought him back. "There is one problem," he said. "Without the Rod of Rassilon, I can open the Eye of Harmony. I can even channel it, through the Sash. But I can't use it to power the de-mat gun."  
      
The postwar Doctor looked pathetically grateful to be given a technical problem, though his face quickly clouded over again. "And without that kind of boost to the power, the planet breaks up—and the gun with it—before the anti-time can propagate..." He met his former self's eyes. "Our two timestreams? The Blinovitch effect?"  
      
Turlough shared a look with Lethbridge-Stewart; they'd both seen that effect at work, and the tremendous power it unleashed.

The wartime Doctor fingered his cravat, tucking it into the garish Sash of Rassilon, and straightened his cuffs fussily. The fastidiousness of the condemned man, Turlough realized. "Do you have a better idea?"

~*~

Jack breathed in his death rattle—he was on a ship, a _Trion _ship. They were found. But in time, in time? He struggled to sit up, to look around, to call for—  
      
_Martha._ Kitted out in Trion medical gear and smiling down over his cot. "Good to see you're back with us, Jack."  
      
There were no guards in sight; that could mean rescue by friendly forces, Amyand's men or Daine's; or it could mean the whole section was in lockdown. "Who picked us up?" Talking pulled at his face in new and painful ways; he tried to reach up, but Martha stopped his hand.  
      
"You'll never guess," she said.  
      
"What, the Doctor? Friendly asteroid miners? Rogue Tractators?"  
      
"I'll just let them in now, why don't I?" She stuck her head around the doorframe. "Visiting hours," she called, too chipper for it to be anyone from Trion, and who else—  
      
Who but Sarah Jane Smith and... "Ianto?" He let his hands be grabbed and held, discovered that smiling hurt even worse than talking. "Ianto. Ianto, tell me why my face hurts, and how bad it is."  
      
"No need to worry." Ianto was smiling like it didn't hurt him a damn bit. "I can learn to love you for your mind."  
      
"Flatterer." Jack drew one of Ianto's hands up—it was that or let go of it—and prodded his cheek; touch revealed that half his face, temple to nose to jaw, was hot and tender and "Ow. _Ow._ Is that sunburn?"  
      
"Sorry," said Martha, sounding like she meant it. "I had to break your helmet visor off to signal to the ship; I didn't think they'd see me otherwise."  
      
"Lucky for us they did. Whose ship is this, anyway?"  
      
"Despina's," said Martha, at the same time Sarah Jane said "The Master's." Sarah went on. "We're extraditing her crew to Trion; they were meant to be exchanged for you, but as soon as we got in-system, we heard about your mission from Attris Daine, and this turned into a rescue."  
      
"And the Master's crew went along with that?"

Sarah Jane and Ianto exchanged a barely-suppressed smirk. "The crew are in the brig," Ianto volunteered.

"Then who flew the ship?"

Ianto smiled, if anything, wider than when he'd seen Jack. "Turns out it's not actually so hard."

"Dead easy, even," added Sarah.

The damn sunburn was pulling. "See, I've always loved you for your mind." Ianto looked too proud even to blush. Jack glanced around the small sickbay. "Wait, who's got the conn now?"

"My son," Sarah chirped; and he'd thought _Ianto_ was proud.

"Good on him. Skill every boy should learn. Right up there with pitching a pup tent."

They gave him the grand tour: it was a nice little gig, luxurious for its size. Ianto, Jack noted with equal parts amusement and pleasure, had taken the Master's stateroom—or boudoir, really, with its opulent Cyrrhenian furnishings and silk hangings. Luke Smith showed them the bridge, and their inbound course to Trion landing orbit. He was taking them in slow—there was a lot of junk in high orbit, though the rail gun platforms had all been successfully closed down—but the course was safe and sure; he had the makings of a first-class astrogator. Jack said so, and Luke practically glowed; he was quite happy to have Jack take the co-pilot's seat while Sarah and Ianto filled him in on the news from Earth.

"Good old Attris," he said at the end of it. "She dared you to come rescue us, in case she couldn't push sending us home past her bosses. Surprised UNIT gave you permission, though." He looked up at Ianto's studied innocence. "Or is this a Torchwood op?"

"Officially," Ianto said. "If anyone asks."

Martha's brows lifted. "We should expect some... jurisdictional squabbling, back home, though."

Jack's could feel his sunburn pulling again. "You went right over UNIT's head, didn't you?"

Sarah Jane was the only one who seemed remotely flustered. "Well. It wasn't really their ship. Not technically."

"Technically, we're delivering impounded property to the Trions," said Luke seriously.

"Technically," said Ianto, "maritime salvage laws can be construed to apply to spacecraft." If he had another comment, it was buried under a yawn.

"So,_ technically,_ you told Colonel Mace 'Finders, keepers,' and left him shaking his fist at your ion trail. Nice work. Am I keeping you up?"

They had hours yet before planetfall, at the Smiths' cautious pace. Ianto, who'd taken the sleep shift opposite Luke, was practically nodding on his feet. Jack left Luke at the controls—it was perfectly safe; Jack had checked every aspect of their course and condition from the co-pilot's station—and walked Ianto to his quarters.

"So, your first interstellar." He flung back the curtains on the carved bedframe; this was a ship that expected never to have a gravity breakdown. "You know, there's a naval tradition for the first time you cross the light barrier."

"Oh?" Ianto leaned into Jack's shoulder, letting himself be supported as he unlaced his shoes. "Like for crossing the Equator on Earth?"

"Similar," Jack allowed. "More fun, though. They say it brings bad luck, to not be properly initiated."

Ianto valiantly stifled another yawn, and drew himself up and into Jack's arms. "And we certainly can't have that."

Jack let Ianto's clothes lie where they fell— wrinkling his suit marked him, more than anything you could do to his body—and Ianto let himself be turned and stripped and laid down, in his hurry to get to Jack's skin. "You were even redder when we got you out of that suit," he said. "Your skin was covered in frost, and sloughing off in layers."

"I've burned and I've frozen, but I don't think I've ever done both at once before," Jack said. Ianto's hands were everywhere; Jack stretched to let himself be touched, to let his body speak reassurance. "This was a new one for me."

"God, Jack." Ianto took his face by the unburnt side and kissed him.

It was going to be one of those nights, where his tongue never got anywhere else because Ianto wouldn't let it go. Jack liked those nights just fine; he liked Ianto's tongue, and Ianto's hands on him, making sure every inch of skin was right where it belonged.

And this, this was what all his excess of life was good for: not for dying and reviving, over and over like a machine for survival, but for welling up and reminding him why this body, this fixed point in time, was worth coming back to.  
    

"So what do you think," he murmured against Ianto's neck, after. "Your first interstellar."

"I don't know how you stay on Earth," Ianto said, too sleepy and sated to self-censor. "How you don't go mad, missing this."

Jack pressed his cheek to Ianto's shoulder, making the pain from his burn be the only thing that hurt. "There's so much I could show you," he said. "A whole galaxy. I want to show you so much."

Ianto rolled over in Jack's arms, let him see him smiling. "You've done that already."

Jack left Ianto sleeping; returning to life always reset his diurnal cycle to morning. It would have been inconvenient, if he didn't need so little sleep these days. He wandered the corridors, checking emergency equipment, evac suits, fire control bulkheads, without even realizing what he was doing—and then kept at it once he did realize; however good a job Ianto and Luke had done with the navigation, there was more that go could wrong in space than bad driving. He verified all the engine readouts; he reviewed the security recordings in the brig and checked the force-shielded doors.

He fetched up in the aft observation gallery, with the lighting still showing an hour or two until shift's end, and sat down on the deckplates to watch Trion space junk crawl by. This was the other part of traveling—the dead space, the distances you couldn't shortcut. The boredom.

The stars, right _there._

Martha slid down the bulkhead beside him. "This seat taken?"

"Nope."

She stretched out her legs on the decking, ankles crossed. "I asked Luke what time it is on Earth. Turns out I'm supposed to be meeting with the caterer, right this minute." She twisted her ring. "Thought that was something I'd be happy to leave to Tom."

Jack looked at her sidelong. "And you're not?"  

"Well. Maybe a little. But—the closer the wedding gets, the more I want to be there. With him. Doing this together."

There wasn't much to say to that. Jack clasped her shoulder, and she squeezed his hand, but for once didn't make him move it.

"It's like you said," she said finally. "All this... is always going to be here. But I have to choose the part of it I'm going to take care of."

"And that's Tom?" Sarah Jane leaned against the corridor door.

Martha snorted. "Tom can take care of himself. But—I've saved the Earth." She looked from Jack to Sarah. "We all have—you know what it's like. To have given so much, invested so much, in the fate of a whole planet—something so big you can't even imagine it, and at the same time so small, when you think of all this, all this vastness.

"And you think sometimes how easy it would be to walk away from it. To find your way back out here and... lose yourself. And, well," she finished, shrugging. "I don't know why it should be harder to walk away from a person than from a planet, but it is."

"A planet," Sarah Jane said, very seriously, "can't know how much it needs you."

Martha's lover, Sarah's child. Jack had had both, and he envied them their faith, to pour so much duty and desire into that one single beloved soul. "A planet," he found himself saying, "can't know how much you've hurt it, either."     
      
"Do you have a family, Jack?" asked Sarah Jane, quietly.  
      
"Both kinds."  

She lifted an eyebrow. "Chosen and not?"

"The kind I chose, and the kind that chose me back."

"I sometimes think that's the hardest thing of all," Sarah said. "Being chosen. Being given that trust, and just—accepting it, no matter how little you think you deserve it. I know with Luke..." She slumped back against the doorframe, shaking her head. "There are days when I realize I still don't know the first thing about being a parent. I look around and I can't tell whether any of my choices are good. I mean, taking a fifteen-year-old to pilot a stolen spaceship, just because he's the only person you know who can pick up the maths fast enough? I don't know if that's child endangerment or a brilliant educational opportunity. And I'm never going to know, that's the really scary part—the next tough choice is going to come along, and I'm going to go into it just as blindly.

"But for all that, Luke trusts me to do right by him. I don't know why." She threw up her hands. "But I'd do anything rather than prove him wrong."

"I've proven a lot of people wrong lately," Jack said. Tosh. Owen. The guilt they all felt for Donna. And the Doctor himself, and even poor mad Lucy Saxon. And Ianto, who had just mounted an interstellar rescue mission for him, without any assurance that Jack would do the same for him. Jack didn't know if he even could live up to that sort of trust.

But if the alternative was to take it, and use it, and not even try to return it... Jack hoped he wasn't that much of a bastard.

He looked up; Martha was smiling at him. "You looked like you were someplace pleasant."

The shift lighting was almost at full. Ianto would be waking up soon, sleepy and naked and pliant. Jack grinned. "I will be."

  
Orbital insertion was scheduled for Ianto's shift. Jack watched him bring them in, from the co-pilot's chair. Good hands, he'd always known Ianto had good, steady hands; when Ianto turned around and announced "Parking orbit achieved," Jack wanted to haul him back to their bunk then and there.

He didn't; the Trions wanted Despina's crew to stand trial with Carbry, since they couldn't try Despina herself; and Jack wasn't about to trust the descent and landing to anyone else. Still— "When this is over, want to take a vacation?" he murmured, as Ianto transferred helm control to his station. "We've got a fast ship, plenty of fuel—there's a lot we could see."

"Does seem a bit unfair to Gwen," he said, "making her hold down the Hub all by herself."

"She could come along. See the galaxy, get her feet wet—"

"Be initiated?"

Jack frowned expansively. "All right, but if Rhys is coming, he does _not_ get to drive. I'm putting my foot down." And then ground control gave them their window, and he brought them in: smooth, easy—you'd never know from their flight path how out of practice he was. "Like riding a bicycle," he opined. "A massive, fusion-powered, throbbing bicycle." Ianto kissed him on his sunburn.

.

Trion spaceport again: an expanse of burnt and stained concrete and steel catwalks, without even a view of the sky. Ianto and Luke stopped in the middle of the gangway and stared like tourists.

Damn. Jack had hoped to get away quickly, but it would be utterly unfair not to show them something else of the planet. A night on the town in the capitol, at the very least.

And Attris had had the same thought; she was waiting with a long car for them, and a separate transport for the prisoners. "What will happen to them?" asked Sarah, as uniformed security forces took charge of the five men.

"They'll probably be acquitted of most charges," Attris said, matter-of-factly. "Executive privilege carries a great deal of weight in the Trion legal code, and they were acting under orders. And I doubt we can prove they had more to do with the Tractators than knowingly transporting them to a private installation in a non-allied solar system; that's not actually illegal. Yet." She thumbprinted the transport manifest and handed it back to the transport driver. "But a trial will air President Norman's crimes to the public. And give their unwitting accessories a chance to be officially forgiven, and their willing collaborators a chance to make amends. There's no one in government who's untainted."

"Will the current government weather it, do you think?" said Martha.

"Politically, it could. Personally—Kerl Arnam is not a young man. He may find retirement to be his best option."

"Leaving your boss a shot at the top?" Jack handed Sarah Jane into the front seat with Attris and settled into the jump seat across from Ianto, almost in his lap, where he could watch Ianto watch his first alien planet roll by. Luke was looking for a seatbelt and failing to find one; Martha leaned over and showed him where the personal forcefield control was, and then engaged her own rather guiltily.

Actrion was an imposing enough city, Jack supposed, all steel-and-glass like a gothic Manhattan. And the sky was alien enough, a nice leaf green. There were certainly worse planets for one's first time abroad. He half tuned out the political discussion, watching Ianto's eyes widen and slowly warming to the place that had put that look in them.

So he drifted, half-listening, through the updates on Carbry (in custody), and the Tractators (only twenty or so had soft-landed, and the local militias had blown most of them to bits), and through Sarah's handing over the cure for Carbry's soldiers' Despex programming. He pointed out sights to Ianto in an undertone: alien sidewalk. Alien newspapers. Alien commuters hopping onto alien streetcars, wearing alien epaulettes. Lots of epaulettes.

He drifted back into the general conversation over dinner—Martha had steered them to a terrace cafe with a phenomenal view; good for her—when Attris conveyed their scientists' thanks. "Our researchers had already reverse-engineered the fiber-mediated neural interface—we subdued Carbry's troops by blocking his programming with broadcast white-noise, of a sort, and we've been having some success with implanting counter-orders.  But those are both terribly hard on the affected men; it will be good to be able to remove the mechanism of control from them entirely."

The Earthfolk shared a look around the table. "Could we share those results?" asked Martha. "The Tractator nests on Earth were controlled through a Despex-mediated signaling device. If we could use broadcast orders to contain the infestation—"

"Of course," said Attris. "It's the Trion League's fault that you've been subjected to this scourge; it will pleasure us greatly to grant you release."

Sarah Jane coughed politely into her napkin. Ianto sputtered into his wineglass and drenched his tie. "Sorry, sorry." He frowned at the raspberry silk; at least the wine had been a white, or a pale yellow. "I, uh, I don't think that quite translated the way you meant it."

And it couldn't have; poor Attris must have a horror of making an unintentional double entendre like—

—like Jack had heard. Across the table, Martha's eyes widened. "Miss Daine—you've been wearing a translator all evening, right?"

"The best we have for Terran English." Her mouth, Jack realized, was out of sync with her words. "Clearly, it needs pinching."

"Tweaking," said Ianto, deadpan.

"Thank you, yes."

Jack met Martha's eyes, pleading; she shook her head. Both of them. Sometime tonight, they'd both lost their understanding of Trion.

The Doctor wasn't coming back here.


	26. Chapter 26

The Doctors led them back up to the galleried room, the Panopticon, in grim silence. The other TARDIS still stood there; Turlough thought there were more caster tracks in the blood around it.

The wartime Doctor opened its doors and gestured them all in—wood paneling, a few comfortable chairs behind the console; much nicer than the underwater monstrosity they'd arrived in. "Run out some cables from the control circuits, if you would—basic console functions; you'd know as well as I." He disappeared into the back corridors; the postwar Doctor opened a cabinet and thrust a handful of synoptic relays into Turlough's arms.

This new console, or rather the old one, was much more intuitive; Turlough had hooked all the primary functions into whatever was at the Doctor's end of the cables by the time the wartime Doctor reappeared, hefting a gun of startlingly simple design. "Good work, Turlough. Let's see what my counterpart's done."

Outside, a megalith— or, presumably, a console, since it was outfitted with a bank of controls—had appeared just off the center of the room, jutting out through a rift between two flagstones. The Doctor had patched the bundled cables into an interface that didn't look designed for them at all, but he nodded at the mess with grim satisfaction. "That should do," he said. "Your TARDIS can interface with the psionics in the Sash." He waited, as though it had been a question.

And his counterpart nodded in answer. "You're subject to the First Law of Time," said the wartime Doctor. "I'm not. I think that makes me the one to access the Eye. We daren't risk collapsing the temporal gradient too quickly." Solemnly, he held out the gun, balanced on both palms.

The postwar Doctor took it. "Turlough. You know where to find the quick return lever? In both TARDISes?"

"Same place it's always been, under the fault locator."

"Good man. You and the Brigadier will need to—see us off. After. Make sure everyone gets into the right ship."

He made it sound like there might be something left of him. After. At least, like it wasn't a forgone conclusion.

And if he was wrong—if they returned alone. Well. Quick return would take them back to Paris. It was a city, at least, and one where he theoretically spoke the language; Lethbridge-Stewart's UNIT contacts or his Despex ones would get him to Carbry's communications array, and he could contact Trion, and find out how much trouble he'd be in if he went back. He'd survive, at least, on one world or the other. "I'll get us back, Doctor."

"Good." The Doctor turned the gun over in his hands.

The wartime Doctor picked up the trailing end of the Sash he wore and offered it to Lethbridge-Stewart. "Can you wrap this over my counterpart's shoulders? I daren't touch him, not yet." The Brigadier obliged; the Doctor bent to receive the vestments. Not like a monarch—like Gawain baring his neck for Bercilak's lady's girdle, knowing the next stroke he felt would be cold metal.

The Doctor straightened the sash, as pointlessly fussy with his tie as the other had been with his cravat. And then they nodded to each other, and the wartime Doctor closed his eyes—psionic controls, of course—and the room began to shake around them. The narrow rift around the control megalith began, slowly, to widen; and above their heads, smoothly and silently, the roof slid apart.     

The sky was burning. No, the sky was flame-colored, livid orange, and pierced with holes—atmospheric eddies, Turlough realized, where the planet's air was boiling out into space. Stars were visible at their centers; some were churning and throwing off their own atmospheres. Some had collapsed, and their outer layers were whirling out into accretion discs. And spinning through everything was the Dalek fleet—thousands, _millions,_ of Dalek saucers, streaming—not down. Streaming _up, _back into space. Fresh from their conquest.

It almost distracted him from the abyss cracking the room—seething golden light streamed up around the control console, and the two Time Lords who stood at it. There was darkness at the center of it, at the bottom of the chasm, a darkness too bright to look at.

The Doctors looked at each other. "You'll need to wait for me to focus the anti-time stream, before you collapse the temporal gradient."

The other Doctor looked down at the gun in his hands. "You're, um. You might want to look for time pockets. Any little boltholes—the Medusa Cascade's a tidy out-of-the-way place. You know, that sort of thing."

The wartime Doctor looked hard at his counterpart. He won't succeed, thought Turlough. There had only been one timeline on the Observatory screens, and the other Doctor knew it. But that Doctor said only, "Will this work, Doctor?  Am I—are we doing the right thing?"

Careful of the Sash on his shoulders, the Doctor gestured up at the departing Dalek fleet. "They've got the treasures of Rassilon now. Everything but the Eye, and the power it commands. Think what they could do."

The wartime Doctor nodded. "Medusa Cascade, you say." He took a deep breath, caught Turlough's eye, then Lethbridge-Stewart's. "So glad I got to see you both again. And get to again. Pity I won't get to look forward to it."

There didn't seem to be anything more to say. Except—Turlough lifted his head at a sound, that familiar sound again—"Daleks!"

They burst in through the Panopticon upper galleries, winding their way down the ramps. The Doctor lifted the de-mat gun and fired; one and then another vanished with hideous finality. "Hold them off," he shouted. And the floor erupted in cracks, flinging Turlough to the ground.

The Brigadier tossed him a staser; he was calmly potting Daleks while, from the chasm, the brilliant darkness streamed up and out, into the flaming sky. Turlough fired in the opposite direction, but his marksmanship needed work; the Dalek guns didn't have the staser's range, but they were getting closer every second. And there was no end to them; they poured in now through every door.

The brilliance rippled—the Doctor waded straight into it, up to the controls, the Sash blinding at his neck. The darkness began to cohere around him.

Dalek gunfire tore up the floor before Turlough. He retreated, flung himself behind a block of rubble that wouldn't deter a mouse—

And then from sudden whirlpools in the air, the room filled with  Tractators—engaging the Daleks, grappling with them, making a wall around the time travelers, first of their bodies and then of glowing gravitic fields.

One Doctor was entirely enveloped in the anti-energy's glow, outstretched hands shimmering with it. He raised them to the sky, and the stream of darkness met the rising Dalek saucers. They glittered with it, brilliant—and the other Doctor lifted the de-mat gun and fired.

Dalek saucers outside the stream caught that dark shimmer and vanished; and then, in a wave, the Daleks encircling them winked out. The planet quaked under their feet. Without dropping the gun, or ceasing to fire, the Doctor reached out and took his own hand.

The shockwave threw Turlough back to the floor. When he could see again, the Citadel was crumbling around them. There were no Dalek saucers in the sky, no Daleks in the Panopticon; only the ring of motionless Tractators. A crack opened under one insect's feet; its gravitic field kept it motionless, in the air, while its fellows' corpses slid under it into a chasm full of roiling light and dark.

In the center of the room, this time's Doctor was haloed—no, lit from within—by that horrible light; his face streamed gold. Turlough's Doctor pulled him away from the chasm's edge, and yanked the Sash off over his head; that unbalanced them both and knocked them to the ground. Swaying on his knees, Turlough's Doctor pulled something from the body of the gun: a simple metal key. The gun itself winked out, with its own bleak effect; the Doctor collapsed next to his unconscious counterpart. The gleaming darkness billowed up, silhouetting them.

Turlough got to his feet and ran to drag the Doctor out of that maelstrom. At his side, the Brigadier had the other Doctor by the feet. "Take care of this one first," he said; "he's in a bad way."

They dragged him into his TARDIS, kicking cables out of the doorway. His face was awash in brilliance. "Regeneration," said Lethbridge-Stewart. "It's starting. Poor devil. He's no good at taking care of himself when this happens."

"The Doctor would have remembered, if either of us had been with him," Turlough said. He touched his cheek helplessly. "He's ice cold!"

There was a leather jacket folded in a chair against one wall; Turlough wrapped it around the Doctor's shoulders and laid him flat on the floor—and, on a further thought, dragged the chair over next to him. Little enough help to give him, but it was all he could do. He set three seconds on the quick-return switch and left the TARDIS. It dematerialized just moments before a rent opened in the floor under it.

It took the two of them to get the other Doctor to his feet, and that was all the help he was able to give them. He sagged between them, deadweight, the Sash of Rassilon still hanging over his neck. Getting back to the alcove where they'd left his TARDIS took precious minutes, while the ceilings fell in around them and the walls cracked ominously. They had to backtrack twice around gaps in the floor; one was filled with rubble; the other had no bottom but the swirling, gleaming dark.

At the TARDIS doors, Turlough dug through the Doctor's pockets for his key without success, though he found the Great Key—of Rassilon, he supposed—in three separate pockets. The Doctor stirred long enough to snap his fingers; the doors opened on their own.

"How long have you been able to do that?" But the Doctor was unconscious. They laid him out on the deck grating, and Turlough hit the quick return lever.

Dematerialization was even worse than the last time. By the time they were fully in flight, the Doctor was frigid to the touch, completely unresponsive. Turlough wished desperately for him to wake—every control showed nonsense, the TARDIS out of control and spinning off into the void—but he was paralyzed, frozen in time and feeling every ripple of the vortex.

And then, abruptly, they were out of it, materializing, badly. Something creaked, something snapped, and acrid greenish smoke billowed up from the seams of the TARDIS. As soon as the rotor stilled, Turlough threw open the doors to let the fumes out. It was night, wherever they were. He helped the Brigadier lift the Doctor and drag him outside. They left the Sash in the TARDIS.

"Well," said Turlough, looking around as best he could with a comatose Time Lord slung over his shoulder, "it's not Paris." It was the end of some narrow cobbled street, poorly lit and with no useful signage, but clearly English.

There was only one direction to walk—the town, whatever it was, ended in scrubby moorland behind them. But they had gone only a few paces when a car puttered into earshot, and then into view, and halted in front of them. A blonde woman—ruddy and ringleted, thankfully, and looking nothing like Despina—opened the door and called out to them. "Excuse me—are any of you the Doctor?"

"He is," said Turlough.

"Oh, good," she said. "You'll want UNIT, then; they're all down the pub. Here, hop in."

And why not? Turlough got the Doctor wedged into the back and crawled in next to him; Lethbridge-Stewart had claimed the front seat as though by divine right. He squinted at their driver. "Miss Wheare, was it?"

She smiled. "That's right, Sir Alastair. Doctor Sullivan found a cure for the Despex contamination and sent me home. Of course, home is still crawling with Tractators, so I've been helping out how I can."

"Good of you," said Lethbridge-Stewart.

The pub she delivered them to was, in fact, full of UNIT troops in fatigues and berets, who all clambered to their feet in startlement on recognizing the Brigadier. Lethbridge-Stewart took full advantage. "I need two guards on the TARDIS, a complete status report, and a room for the Doctor. Now, if you please." He took someone's offered chair and sat down heavily. "And if someone could find a room for me, it would be much appreciated."

Underlings queued up to report to the Brigadier, and one noncom appeared at Turlough's side, and took the Doctor's arm. "I'll help you put him to bed, sir; upstairs. You sure he doesn't need a doctor?_ A _doctor, not—you know."

Turlough half dragged the Doctor through the door and up onto a narrow bed. "They wouldn't know what to do with him." Any more than I do, he thought.

He got the Doctor's shoes and suit off, at least, and manhandled him under the bedclothes. That was something. The Doctor's skin was still cold to the touch, his heartbeats almost undetectable. Almost. He held on to that 'almost.' He toed off his own shoes. His trouser cuffs were sticky with old blood—practically everything was; he'd _rolled _in it, on the Panopticon floor—

He sat down on the edge of the bed, jumped up again before the blood could smear; the motion made his head swim.

One of his problems, at least, was solvable. He cracked the door, reluctant to leave the Doctor, but the noncom was still on guard in the hallway, where Turlough had thought he would be. "If it's not too much trouble, do you think you could find me a change of clothes?" He extended the bloodier arm of his coat; it reeked like an abattoir.

The noncom paled. "I'll find a laundry bag for those, too."  

So that was clothing. Shell-shock was less tractable. Turlough wrapped his arms around his knees and stared at the Doctor and waited for the solider to bring him something clean.

The knock on the door, when it came, was Lethbridge-Stewart. He tossed Turlough a set of black fatigues. "The short version," he said, in a tone that suggested Turlough really didn't want the long version, "is that we went off course by a week and several thousand miles. This is Scarpton-le-dale, Lancashire, just over the hill from a Despex production site; the Tractators are still digging; and Sarah Jane Smith absconded with the Master's spacecraft Sunday evening."

Turlough digested this. "Define 'absconded.'"

The Brigadier looked like he was stifling a smile. "Sprung the Master's crew from UNIT detention facilities and took them back to Trion to exchange for Doctor Jones and Captain Harkness. Took them the specs on Sullivan's Despex treatment as well."

"So that's under control then."

"Just be glad it's not your job convincing Colonel Mace of that. I hear the man's put in for a transfer to Vancouver." He sighed. "At any rate, I'm sure the Doctor will want to see the Tractator diggings for himself, when he wakes up." Turlough smothered a laugh—had the man _seen _him?—and the Brigadier glared at him. "He will wake up. I've seen this before. Give him a day or so, he'll be right as rain. Wish I knew how he does it." He paused in the doorway. "I've posted a guard, for the Doctor's sake, but, ah, feel free to come and go. You're not a prisoner." His tone suggested that this was an entirely theoretical liberty, but still. It was a good start.

Turlough put on the fatigues, wadded the bloodstained suit up in a bag in a corner, and dozed, slumped against the headboard; after the third or fourth time he nodded and woke, he finally stretched out alongside the Doctor. He'd wake up if anything happened—and in fact he did wake, twice, when the Doctor stirred and ranted, incomprehensibly, before subsiding back into his chilly sleep.

He woke again, over-warm, just before dawn, and found the Doctor asleep— sleeping normally, or as normally as he ever did.

The last time he woke, it was late morning. Weak spring sunlight illuminated a twee but comfortable guest-house room, left to get rather dusty in the offseason. The Doctor perched on the windowsill, head pillowed against the plaid curtains, watching the street below. "Hullo!" He sounded chipper. It didn't sound forced.

"Doctor. How much do you remember?" Turlough found his shoes and put them on, for lack of anything better to do.

"Ah. Right. I, ah—I think all of it? The third time might just be the charm, where Great Key-induced amnesia is concerned. I found this in my pocket—" he flourished the Key like a magician producing it from someone's ear—"and it all sort of came flooding back." He tucked the Key into his jacket. "And here we are in Scarpton-le-dale, with nothing to do but wait. Not a bad little place for a holiday, though—I could do with a holiday."

"What are we waiting for, Doctor?"

"Exactly! No time like the present."

"No, I mean—never mind." He followed the Doctor out the door. "What about the TARDIS? She was full of smoke when we landed—"

"Poor old girl. That'll just be the interstitial relays; it's about time I gave those a good overhaul."

"So we're just... going to wait here. For—something."

"Mm-hmm. Let's hope the Tractators don't get out of hand in the meantime."

He commandeered a UNIT jeep and a driver for it. "Take us out to the mine, Sergeant—Sergeant...?"  

"Patel, sir. Martha Jones's team. She talks a lot about you."

"Good, good. Um. It is good, I hope?"

"Mostly, sir. Mostly." Patel declined to elaborate. Turlough decided he liked Sergeant Patel.

The mine was a field full of sinkholes, spreading out around a dreadful early-Victorian industrial hulk—Despina's sense of the dramatic certainly hadn't failed her when she'd bought this place. Turlough stepped gingerly out of the jeep; the ground was trembling, and he could sense the faint, queasy tug in his ears that spoke of gravitic fields, just askew from the planet's own. "How close are they to the surface?" he asked.

"Too close." A young man with no uniform but a great deal of firepower wandered up and leaned against the jeep. "Morning, Doctor."

"Mickey! Mickey Smith, Vislor Turlough, Turlough, Mickey. He used to travel with me," he explained, to either or both of them.

"Figured," said Mickey. He gestured with a very large gun at the field. "The Tractators have been digging for a week now, since the day of that fashion show. About fifteen hundred feet below the surface, here; closer in, little further downhill. They're making a straight line; don't seem to care what shape the surface is."

Turlough's stomach turned over. "And what shape is the underground? Just out of curiosity."

Mickey opened his laptop computer and found a chart. "That's as of ten this morning."

The pattern was horribly familiar. "They're preparing the Earth for gravitic drive!"

The Doctor held Turlough in place by his shoulder, and craned his neck to peer around him. "Looks like it, yeah."

"Can they still do that?" Patel, at least, looked properly worried. "We shut down the thing on the moon."

"An energy pulse? That was just to speed things up." The Doctor's voice was right in Turlough's ear, like an echo of his own thoughts. "The Tractators can still move this planet on their own." Except Turlough's thoughts weren't nearly so blithe.

"And what's UNIT doing?" demanded Turlough. "Aside from keeping tabs?"

"Sir Alastair sicced some of the tech people on the plant manager's necktie this morning," volunteered Sergeant Patel.

"Oh, good, excellent." The Doctor bounced back on his toes.

"Are we waiting for someone to reverse-engineer the Despex control mechanisms?" asked Turlough.

"Mm-hmm. Put lots of clever humans on it, it'll get done." He frowned. "That wouldn't suddenly turn out to be your secret specialty, would it?"

"Sorry. R&amp;D was all handled by Carbry's section and the Earthside divisions."

"Worth a try, though."

"Oh, absolutely."

They stared out at the field for a while in silence.

"All right." The Doctor clapped his hands. "Back to the TARDIS. Come on, Turlough. Good hunting, Mickey. Sergeant!"

They piled back into the jeep. "So we're starting that overhaul."     
      
"Nah, not today."

"The Tractators are maybe a week from full gravitic control of the Earth."

"So that gives us six days' holiday. No, I thought the smoke might have cleared from the wardrobe room. I don't know about you, but I'm getting a bit tired of this suit."

.

The smoke had cleared, mostly. Turlough found a white shirt and a plain dark suit in his size. The style was old, or possibly retro; he wondered whose it had been. He put it on and folded the borrowed uniform. The Doctor, meanwhile, dragged a brace of wire-cage fans from some storage room and set them up at seemingly random points in the TARDIS corridors, to speed the airing-out. When he finally emerged from the wardrobe room, it was in a blue suit of striking ugliness.  
      
"Suits you," said Turlough, mostly seriously.  
      
"You think so? I wonder if it's not time for a change."  
      
"I never know when your questions are loaded, and when they're meaningless."  
      
"What, nothing in between?"  
      
Turlough scoffed wordlessly.  
      
"I suppose I deserve that," the Doctor muttered, and locked the TARDIS door. "No, go on, we'll walk," he said to Patel.

Turlough dropped the fatigues on the seat of the jeep. "Tell whoever owns these thank you," he said, and hurried to catch the Doctor up; he had taken off at a rapid pace.

He stalked off in the general direction of the pub, but taking the long way, up and down every street in the town. "Doctor," said Turlough. It was easier to pin him down when there was no one else he could turn to to change the subject. "The Medusa Cascade. Did you—did you change your own timeline?"

The Doctor stopped, hands jammed into his pockets. "You know that's not possible."

"But you tried."

He shrugged one shoulder crumpling a little. "I was violating one law of Time already. And... other laws. Against all that..." he shrugged again. "Everything else was set. It had to be. But I thought, one pocket out of time..." He looked up without lifting his head, under his brows. "But there's no such thing. Not anymore."

"No such thing as—?"

"Out of time." He straightened a little, sniffed the air, headed back up the street. "Come on," he said, not looking back.

Where to, Turlough almost asked. But that sudden refusal to meet his eyes was—had been—a very familiar gesture, once. Turlough followed, almost on his heels, heart suddenly going very fast.

It was a goodbye, of course, even if not an immediate one. Turlough couldn't resent that, much; he had always hoped to see the Doctor again, just once, but even in his darkest days drinking alone at Turlough Hall, just once was all he'd been able to wish for. To get more than that from the Doctor—well, you'd have to live on Earth, for one thing. A thought occurred; but the Doctor fumbled his key in the door of the room, and Turlough put it aside, put everything aside but this.

Someone had taken away his bloody clothes; Turlough hoped they had burned them. The room was empty, with nothing of his or the Doctor's in it for witness.

The Doctor flopped back onto the bed, shoes and all, and folded his hands behind his head. He was going to leave everything to Turlough, then. Turlough's hands went to his bare throat, wishing for a tie to fidget with. The Doctor's eyes followed every nervous flutter, avid and rapt. Or wary: his face was wary, everything shuttered but that gaze. I could stop this with a word, thought Turlough. And then he had to smile, to think the Doctor could ever think he would.

"If all you're going to do is watch," he said, "then watch." There was one window over the head of the bed, a second alongside it, opposite the door. Turlough opened both, raised the shades and threw the curtains wide. Midday light spilled through both, diffuse and white: it pooled on the bed, and outlined the Doctor's hair in spiky shadows on the pillow. The Doctor swallowed, and the shadows quivered.

Turlough stripped off his jacket almost defiantly, stood in the light while he unbuttoned his shirt and threw it down. He was flaunting his brand, he knew, the way he did with lovers he cared nothing for—daring a response, almost demanding one.

The Doctor sat up and reached out. His fingers stopped just short of the scar. "You never..." He bridged the distance, traced the outline of the double triangle. The nerveless skin pulled tight, carrying the sensation away. "You never used to want me to touch you, like this."

All the rest of his skin was awake, waiting to feel the touch his brand couldn't. "I want you to."

Almost unbearably lightly, the Doctor traced the brand with his fingertips; and then closed his hands over Turlough's biceps, molding them to his arms, his shoulders, learning the shape of him. Turlough withstood it as long as he could, looking down at the Doctor's half-closed eyes, before he leaned in and took the Doctor's mouth.

He bore him back with kisses, one knee on the bed beside him; when the Doctor was finally breathing hard, digging his nails into Turlough's shoulders, Turlough pulled away and shucked off his trousers. He stood there in the light, until the Doctor looked up—until the Doctor saw him, looked at him, naked and hard and getting harder with every breath.

The Doctor's hands went to his buttons; Turlough took him by the wrist. "Let me." He swiped his thumb over the Doctor's pulse point, caressed the hand he held until the Doctor's eyes threatened to fall shut, until he was struggling to keep looking. "You just keep your eyes open."

He undid the Doctor's shirt and trousers, disheveled him thoroughly and drank in the sight, before finally letting the Doctor out of his clothes.  He was even skinnier than he looked, all sharp bones and hollows. Turlough palmed one, the shallow depression at his hip joint, and leaned down to follow his hand with his tongue. "Doctor, please just let me—let me—"

"I'd like to try to stop you," he murmured, but breathlessly, so that was all right. This was not how it had been, with his Doctor; that mattered to Turlough, that this was different—that they were doing this as they were now, and not as the people they'd been.

His Doctor had liked to give directions, and never more than when Turlough was on top. His Doctor had seldom been content to lie back and be taken care of, and almost never until at least the second round.

This Doctor fell onto his back at the slightest push and spread his long thighs greedily; this Doctor relaxed, ever more pliant against the mattress, the more Turlough moved him, lifted him, pinned him down.

Some things hadn't changed: he tasted the same.

Turlough learned him over, even the things he was sure he already knew. This Doctor was selfish, distracted and distractible; he liked to be driven into focus, liked everything too intense to ignore. He liked Turlough's teeth high along his thighs, liked Turlough's fingers twisting inside him.  He was tight around his cock, and his face tight, eyes straining as if to look right through him; until all at once he opened up, his head falling back, his mouth open. "Oh. Oh, that's brilliant, that is. Mmm."  
      
And it was; it really was. The sun paced across the bed, a slow square of warmth across Turlough's back, across the Doctor's bent legs. Turlough made it as slow as he could, long slow thrusts alternating with slow shallow ones and with just rocking together, joined. The Doctor came, sudden and untouched, grinned through it and thrust back up against him with undiminished appetite.  
      
Turlough reached for him then, stroked him back to hardness from inside and out. Having come once made the Doctor pickier, or at least focused his desires: he began to talk, finally, a steady murmur that began with "there" and "harder" and picked up, in volume and detail, while Turlough's slow care began to give way before his own need.  
      
It ended noisily and hard, Turlough hanging his head between the Doctor's knees, moaning with every smooth, tight thrust; the Doctor gasping open-eyed. "Knew you'd be brilliant at this—brilliant—oh, just like that, with your hips, do that—oh, yeah, do that for a long time. Do a lot of that, a lot more." Turlough wanted nothing better—he wanted to do this forever, wanted the Doctor's cock jumping in his hand and the Doctor's heels pressing into his back and the Doctor's hips thrusting up to meet him, every time. Every muscle in his body was straining towards his climax; and when it came, every inch of skin seemed to tremble and leap with his release.  
      
He fell panting to hands and knees, and eased his body down against the Doctor's, trapping the Doctor's erection between them. "Don't come yet," he pleaded. "I don't want this to be over."  
      
The Doctor shut his eyes. "Going to keep me like this? Forever?" It sounded like a challenge, or a wish. He thrust against Turlough's stomach, pressing with his whole body, trembling—so close—  
      
With a moan, Turlough slid down and swallowed him, fucked him on his fingers while he worked him, held him on the edge for one long glorious moment before he fell.  
      
They lay in the sunlight, Turlough's head on the Doctor's thigh. "How long a holiday do you think you'll get?" he asked.  
      
The very slightest catch in the Doctor's breath. "Maybe another day. Maybe three or four. Hard to say."  
      
Turlough nodded. "Maybe we can do this again, then."  
      
"Was rather good, wasn't it?" the Doctor said, as though he could take any of the credit.  
      
They could have a long goodbye, at least; learn each other well enough to know who they'd said farewell to. The idea should have saddened him, Turlough thought. But it contented him, to know he could sit up whenever he wanted to, and trace the sunlit lines of the Doctor's arms and chin and neck, and commit every detail to memory.


	27. Chapter 27

As it turned out, they stayed another three days in Scarpton-le-dale. The Doctor wandered down to the mobile HQ every day, checking UNIT's near-earth telemetry against his own, but for the most part he worked on the TARDIS.  
      
Turlough helped, when the Doctor was in the mood for company, and sometimes when he wasn't. Once, he asked the Doctor about Despina: "Your counterpart said she got away with enough relics to build her own world."

The Doctor looked at him sidelong, and then stuck his head deeper into the chronotic guidance assembly. "Like what?"  He didn't sound eager for the answer.

"Matrix data— a genetic loom—" whatever that was, "some kind of solar vortex manipulator--" He could see the names sinking into the Doctor's thoughts.

"Suppose so," he said finally.

"Suppose...?"

He shut the roundel door. "He could build a world with that lot."

"If she does... She offered to let you rule by her side."

"The Master's made me that offer before. And with more to back it up." He took the toolbox and stalked off in the direction of the art gallery.

"Are you going to do anything about her? I got the impression some of what she stole was—powerful."

The Doctor stopped, and put out a hand to the wall. His fingers pressed sharply against the brickwork. "I'm not the police," he said.

"I never said you were." He held out a hand for the toolbox.

The Doctor gave it him, though his shoulders stayed bent. "Auxiliary power units next, I think."

Turlough followed the Doctor into the gallery and knelt to lay out his tools. "She will get bored," he said.

"Hmm?"

"The Master. She's not interested in planetary governance. If she does build that world, she'll walk away from it."

The Doctor looked at him sharply, and Turlough remembered that she hadn't walked away from Earth: she'd made it a trap for the Doctor, the whole world. But all the Doctor said was, "You angling for a job?"

"No more than you." And that was pure bravado; Turlough didn't want to think about what might await him on Trion, how much of the mess Despina had walked away from there would end up in his lap.  
      
"Good." The Doctor stowed an unmatched zeus plug between his teeth, and that was the end of the conversation.

      
But having thought once of his fate on Trion, Turlough couldn't push the thought away. After an hour of the Doctor's silence, he left the toolbox within reach and wandered down to the mine and its ragged circle of official and unofficial observers, to see if anyone had a phone and a laptop he could borrow.  
      
Mickey Smith had both, though he was chary of handing them over. "Who do you need to call?"  
      
"My solicitor."  
      
Mickey looked disbelieving.  
      
"Well, technically I need to call his office—he should have a forwarding service set up for—"  
      
"This solicitor. Not Mattias Carbry, is it?"    
      
It was Turlough's turn to blink.  
      
"Right, offworld call. I've got an app for that." He tapped buttons and passed Turlough the phone. "Camera's there; don't cover it with your thumb."  
      
Either Turlough's reading had not kept him acquainted with the state of Earth technology, or someone else had been providing some discreet upgrades. "Are you with UNIT?"  
      
Mickey shook his head. "Freelancer. Working for Torchwood lately."  
      
"Jack Harkness's outfit? That makes sense, then; I can't see him being dogmatic about technological contamination."  
      
Mickey snorted. "Not stupid about it, either. Make your call or don't, but I'm not letting that phone out of my sight."  
      
Turlough made the call. Malkon's assistant, Daine, picked up. "Mr. Turlough! We've been trying to reach you." She sounded disapproving, which Turlough found rather trying from someone who'd witnessed his kidnapping.  
      
"Yes, well, I've been a bit busy. Can you pass me up to Malkon?"  
      
His brother was, for once, gratifyingly pleased to see him. "Vislor! I've been worried about you. Are you on Earth?"    
      
"Currently," said Turlough. "Look, Malkon, how much trouble am I in on Trion? They extradited Despina's crew last week—that doesn't set a very good precedent for me if you demand... well."  
      
"They've been cleared," said Malkon, "her crew. They never fired the lunar energy emitter, and just building it wasn't an illicit order. And we can't prove they knew it was to be used against Earth."  
      
"What about the Tractators! They had to have known about those."  
      
"It wasn't actually illegal to transport them. Don't worry; it will be."  
      
"Well, that's a relief. But, if we can return to the charges against me—I assume there are some?"  
      
Malkon looked pained. "Arnam's doing everything he can to dissociate himself from President Norman, but it won't win him re-election; he was too senior in her administration."  
      
He was too polite to voice the rest of that thought; Turlough said it for him. "But you might come through unscathed. If you can dissociate yourself."  
      
"We've got Carbry," he said. "That's... both good and bad for you, Turlough. He used your fiber to suborn a ground forces division."

"It isn't _my—_"

"Then he used your orbitals to launch Tractator attack drones."

"Oh." And those were his, provably so. "You mentioned a good part?"

"He did it all on his own initiative; it seems clear enough you had no    
part in his coup. But, Turlough, you weren't simply following orders. We can't just let you walk away."

He could just walk away now— end the call, give the phone back... and what? Beg asylum from Lethbridge-Stewart? Go into hiding on Earth?

Stowing away in the TARDIS was as unthinkable as it was tempting.

"And if I tell the judicial custodians everything I know? About Carbry, particularly? What sort of deal do you think I could make?" he asked, as casually as he could. "I would like to be able to come home."

Malkon thought it through. "I suppose there is one possibility," he said at last. "How... how great are your political ambitions?"

Turlough laughed, loudly, and couldn't stop smirking the whole time Malkon outlined his plan. When he ended the call, Mickey was looking at him dubiously. "Good news?" he asked.

"Fair to middling," Turlough allowed. "Here, if you know about Carbry, do you know how to get into his records from here? There are a few things I want to look up."  

~*~

Sarah Jane tensed at the Tractator's approach, but this beast had never been ordered to kill her; it went up the gangway calmly, docile in its restraining field.

"This is highly irregular." Daine pursed her lips as the captive Tractator was led aboard the gig, but she initialed their manifest anyway. "I don't even have the authority to lend you this ship."  
      
"I thought you would have seized all the Master's property," said Jack. "Or else what's a treason charge good for?"  
      
"We have—or, the Custodianate has. But this ship is Terran-registered, in her company's name. It's rather a legal tangle."  
      
"Does that mean you don't need it back?" Luke had been the only one of them excited to learn that the Trions were not providing a crew for their return journey. Or the only one to let it show, at least.  
      
Daine favored him with a smile, but gave her answer to the adults. "It means that before sending a reclamation crew, we will give the registered owners—in this case, Despex Ltd. of Terra-- the customary time in which to exert their claim."

Sarah waited until they were under way to say anything else about the matter. "Do you think the other officers of Despex even know they own a spaceship?"

Martha smiled thinly. "Turlough—the Doctor's schoolboy—"

"—yes, I know; he was at the Louvre—"

"—he's Daine's boss's brother. With Agent Carbry back on Trion, and no Trion crew on the ship—"

Sarah raised her eyebrows. "—there's no one on Earth who can be ordered to arrest him, when he comes back." She didn't say _if; _Sir Alastair and the Doctor had been with him.

.

Even with Jack coaxing the engines, it was still a three-day trip back to Earth. Sarah Jane spent most of it in the medical bay with Luke and Martha and their captive Tractator. It had lost an antenna, and looked rather forlorn without it, alone behind the glass of the isolation chamber.

Daine, true to her word, had given them one of the control devices Carbry had used on the Trion soldiers, and all its known operational codes. Martha had a Despex collar she had ripped from a Tractator's neck on one of the rail-gun platforms. They wired the collar to a transmitter and tried to convert the encoding of its weave and charge into signals, but the Tractator's responses were erratic at best; the collar's programming did not seem to map to Carbry's codes.

Martha frowned at the reinforced window. Inside, the Tractator waved its antenna lazily in response to yet another burst. "On the space station, only one Tractator was wearing any Despex of any kind. The others took their orders telepathically. And it was the same in the mine, you said."

"As far as I could tell, yes—Addison wired himself into some sort of transmitter, but the Tractators weren't collared."

"So it's that transmitter we need to duplicate—give a global stop order. Or a global hibernate order. I suppose that's the best we can do, without someplace to... resettle them."

 "Maybe they could punch another vortex and take themselves through it this time," mused Sarah. She sat upright. "Wait a moment. Vortex manipulation—those gravity fields!"  
      
"It's lost one antenna," Martha agreed. She signaled again, and received that same lazy wave of the one remaining appendage.    
      
"Luke," said Sarah, "run up to the bridge, and ask Jack to find us a microgravitometer."

The sensor was procured, and set up in the isolation chamber—and sure enough, every dip and bob of the creature's antenna made the gravitic readout flare to life. "It's generating two waves, or trying to," said Luke. "Using them to amplify each other, like a mynah bird does with sound. It can't get the same intensity or the complexity with just the one manipulator."

"Can we infer the other half of the signal?" wondered Sarah. "Martha, what about its neural impulses to the antennae? Can you record those?"

She could, and did. By the time Ianto came in, yawning at the end of his bridge shift, to remind them to eat, every screen in the lab was scrolled to a different section of a massive table: Despex encoding, transmitter output, neural activity, recorded gravitic effects. And, studded with question marks, Hypothesized Intended Gravitic Output.

By the time Jack gave them the countdown for Earth orbital insertion, the chart was much longer, but the question marks were undiminished. "Still, it's a start," said Martha, crowding into the cockpit after Sarah. "UNIT will have had people on it. If they were able to get hold of one of those communications consoles, they might be ahead of us."

"They don't know any more than we do," said Jack grimly. He called up a long-range scan image of Earth. "Sub-surface profile." The image crackled with faults. "Take a look at these." He pointed to a labyrinthine ringed starburst; identical patterns were scattered over the globe. "That's a gravitic engine. Apply thrust—or a directional gravitational beam—along these lines, like so, and you could steer the planet. At a pretty good clip, too."

Sarah followed his pointing finger. "Northern England. Appalachia. Argentina. India. South Africa. All the centers of infestation."

"And all getting hot." Jack strapped himself into his seat, and motioned for them to do the same. "Sensors show local gravity increasing rapidly under all foci. Program the stop order into the ship's comm systems; we'll need to send it as soon as we land."

"Land?" Ianto tugged his seat harness a little tighter than necessary. "Isn't that a bit conspicuous?"  
      
"The transmat is in London; we don't have time to get from there to—where is this, Lancashire somewhere?"  
      
"Scarpton-le-dale," said Sarah. The comms glowed ready. "Stop code is entered."  
      
"Scarpton-le-dale," echoed Jack. "Here we come."  
      
The ship rumbled around them. "Hang on," said Ianto, quite unnecessarily; Sarah was clinging to her harness. Earth loomed in the viewscreen, larger and larger until it flared into white heat. Luke flipped a toggle and a polarizing filter cut in, and there was Britain, green and tiny, and then green and huge, impossibly huge—  
      
Perspective flipped; the looming ceiling of green was suddenly beneath them, and with a press of gee-force and a bone-jarring rumble, the ship skidded to a halt on the moor. "Transmitting," said Sarah, and sent their best-guess stop code—oh, let it be right!—her hand strangely heavy on the switch.  
      
Her whole body was strangely heavy, even once the harness was off; and outside, on the pockmarked moor, the brush drooped to the ground as if sodden with rain, and the sinkholes around the mill were crumbling in on themselves, visibly. "The gravity—" said Ianto.  
      
Jack lifted an arm, let it fall. "One point four, one point five. Could be worse." But his footsteps thudded on the gangway, and pressed into the earth.  
      
They'd landed on the factory grounds. Across the road from the gates and the guardhouse, trucks and trailers were clustered at the top of the shallow slope—a UNIT mobile HQ, still there, thank goodness! And people already running down the road to meet the ship, a whole sea of uniforms, and in it--  
      
"Doctor!"

He was smiling almost up to his hair. "See! I knew I could leave it to you." Sarah let herself be swept up into a hug, and passed into Mickey's arms as smoothly as a dance. And, oh, there came the Brigadier, decorously bringing up the rear—Sarah clasped his hands warmly. "You made it!"  
      
"I'm glad to see you in one piece, Miss Smith," said Sir Alastair, handing her up off the road and onto a rutted trail of jeep tracks. "And Colonel Mace will be pleased you've brought the ship back intact."  
      
"About that—" began Sarah.  
      
"Yes, about the ship," drawled an almost-familiar voice. Turlough leaned against a trailer wall, not deigning, or not daring, to join the welcoming committee. "Or perhaps that can wait."  
      
"I think it can, yes." She looked automatically for Luke—still surprised, somewhere in her mind, at how quickly that had become second nature. "Have you seen a teenaged boy come this way?"  
      
He was inside the HQ, already ensconced behind a laptop at the back of the situation room, studying real-time seismography. Sarah tousled his hair. "Did the stop signal take effect?"  
      
"After the buildup to the first pulse had already started," said Luke. "That's why the local gravity is still so high. But it's not sustainable."  
      
"Hence the tremors."  
      
Luke nodded gravely. "The Doctor's got a transmitter set up on the Tractators' wavelength. He's had it ready for a few days, he said—just waiting for our data."  
      
"Has he now. I don't know whether to feel trusted, or taken for granted."  
      
The Doctor was, in fact, holding court around the communications station, perusing their table of hypotheticals. "Oh, very good, very good indeed." He adjusted his glasses and keyed in the first of what they'd taken for directional codes. "Let's see if we can get them to show their faces above ground, shall we?"  
      
He hit transmit. The gravity lessened—the Doctor smiled smugly—and kept going. Sarah's hair drifted and her stomach lurched, and there it was, zero-gee. And then the gravity was back, in reverse—pens and headsets and people were falling up toward the ceiling, coffee sloshing straight out of paper cups— "They're generating a repulsor field," Jack shouted, unnecessarily. Sarah grabbed a doorframe and held on, trying uselessly to dig her heels into the carpet.  
      
The Doctor's fingers flew over the keyboard—Sarah recognized a reverse code they'd been fairly sure of—and abruptly, down was in its proper place again. Sarah slumped against the door, feeling the trailer fall heavily onto its axles.  
      
Sarah picked up a notebook that had come to rest at her feet, dropped it experimentally. It fell in a flutter of pages, with a satisfactory _whump _against the floor. "I think we're back to normal."  
      
"Well, that's a start," said the Doctor.  
      
The next code had no effect on the gravity. Jack crowded the ground-penetrating radar controls, peering over the technician's shoulder. "Anything?"  
      
From the doorway, Turlough cleared his throat. "You might want to take a look outside."  
      
Colonel Mace looked almost comically relieved as the civilians—and Lethbridge-Stewart—spilled out the door. But he followed a few paces behind.  
      
Turlough pointed to the swell of land that hid the mine adit. From behind it, Tractators trooped, two by two, marching just as implacably as they had in Paris. And then as they watched, the ground _erupted, _churning and bubbling for a quarter-mile around the adit, right up to the edge of the road. Everywhere, Tractators were rising from the soil, floating in a haze of violet energy over ground gone liquid and roiling. In eerie silence, they formed a circle, concentric circles, on the moor.

"There must be a thousand of them," breathed Sarah.

"Eighteen hundred and some," said the Doctor, distracted. "I lost count." He fumbled with a remote control—repurposed from a gaming console, if Sarah was any judge—and the Tractators lifted their antennae in unison and cast their violet haze over the center of the circle. The air shimmered; reality twisted; and there was a vortex, just like at the runway show. A hole in space-time.

"Where are you going to send them?" said Sarah Jane.

"As far from here as I can."

Turlough was at the Doctor's elbow, quite suddenly. "Not Frontios?"

"Quite possibly. It's a long way for them to have traveled on their own. First things first, though."

He touched a lengthy series of controls. Twenty Tractators peeled out of the inner circle. They trooped through the eye of the vortex, and were gone.

"Gallifrey?" said Turlough. "That was you, too?"

"Gallifrey," echoed Sarah. The other Tractators were narrowing their circle, spiraling in towards the center of the storm. "Doctor, what happened there?"

The violet shimmer spread, encompassed the Tractators—and just like that, they were gone. "History happened," the Doctor said. "As it had to."


	28. Chapter 28

"GPR in Johannesburg shows no subsurface movement." On the stuttering video feed, the last ring of Tractators vanished in a purple flash. Dust eddied up after them, winking in the floodlights, and fell again to the open pit floor.  Captain Price looked up from the screens. "The nest is empty."  
      
"And that's the end of them," said Jack. "I wish cleanup was always this easy." The transmitters had been simple to build, and the control codes—fortunately—the same worldwide.  
      
"Don't forget the moon." Martha peered over the screen of a commandeered laptop. "We'll need to send a cleanup squad up though the transmat, just to make certain. And down into all the mine workings."

"That's a matter for the local commands. Or for Geneva, in the matter of the moonbase." Captain Price stretched in her chair and cracked her knuckles. "Captain Harkness, thank you for your assistance. I think you'll find the debriefing is already under way. Down the pub."  
      
"Best place for it." A corporal appeared with his coat; he shrugged it on. "Doctor Jones—you coming to be debriefed?"  
      
"I'll join you." Jack craned his neck; the laptop screen was full of calligraphy. Martha made shooing motions. "Five minutes, really. Go on."

      
The debriefing had spilled out of the pub into the square. Luke Smith perched on the plinth of the war memorial, explaining hyperspatial navigation to the UNIT noncoms. Inside, Sarah Jane and the Doctor stood at the bar, both watching the scene through the open door. "The collective wisdom of ten thousand humans, in one package," the Doctor was saying. "Brilliant. Utterly brilliant, that is."    
      
"If you mean Luke, yes he is. If you mean the idea..." Sarah shrugged. "Rather a lot of trouble to go through just to get a focus group." She said it fondly. "Hello, Jack."  
      
"Waiting for your pints to settle?"  
      
"I am. And I think the barman would welcome a distraction from the Doctor's drink." Jack followed her look down the bar, to a half-constructed folly of layers and swirls in half a dozen colors.

He caught the beleaguered bartender's eye and asked for Irish coffee. "So you told him about Luke."

"Did everyone else know about my godson's marvelous brain?"

"Godson?" The bartender set out their drinks. The Doctor's was on fire. Sarah took her glass in both hands, turned it as if seeking the best grip.

"We-ell, yeah, I thought—I mean, if you don't mind. I could be a godfather. I was a consigliere once." The Doctor watched the flames die down in his glass. "And I've got fifteen years of catching up to do! Birthday presents, godfatherly advice, maybe a few questions—you know, my people did something very similar." Sarah tensed at that  "my people"; Jack felt himself doing the same. The Doctor volunteered so little about the Time Lords; it was hard not to hoard the scraps he let drop. "Not with imprints of the living. But the mind patterns of the dead got combined in a panatropic network. We used it for prognostication—scientific projections, local reality forecasts..." He prodded his drink with a straw, drawing waves at the layer boundaries. "Never thought to use it as an aesthetic arbiter, though; that's fantastic. Have you ever asked—"  

"No, I have not," sputtered Sarah. "This is why I didn't tell you—I knew you'd just interrogate Luke on all sorts of—"

"Interrogate! Sarah, Sarah. I just—you can't deny he's uniquely poised to resolve some of your species' great questions—justice or mercy! Guns or butter, Ginny or Hermione, _Abbey Road_ or _Sergeant Pepper..._"

"All right, all right." Sarah shook her head, trying to hide a smile. "He's your godson; he knows how to tell you to butt out." She cast another glance out the front door, just as Martha and the Brigadier walked in. "Here comes that jurisdictional dispute. Come on; Ianto's holding a table in the garden."

He and Mickey and a local girl Sarah introduced as Laura were all on at least their second round. "Ianto!" Jack slung an arm over his shoulders. "Lethbridge-Stewart's on his way in—remind me why we have dibs on the Master's ship again?"

"Actually, Jack, we don't." He a slid a stack of documents down the table. Half of them appeared to be in Icelandic. "It seems while we've been gone, there have been some changes in Despex's corporate holdings."

"What he means," drawled Turlough, "is that once the owner vanished without trace, the company's only product was banned in ninety countries, and most of its real estate was undermined by giant insects and then shelled by UNIT—oddly enough, after all this, Despex's creditors suddenly became much less forgiving."

"Many creditors," added Ianto. "The banks have taken Despex to pieces."

Sarah giggled into her drink. "They repossessed it. They _repossessed _our spaceship."

"But _who_ did?" Jack rifled through the papers. "This—" he scanned the pages for an expansion of the unpronounceable acronym—"Akureyri Maritime Loan Company and Fisherman's Benevolent Society?"

"Briefly," said Turlough. "Of course, they've been acquired several times over since that was written. Big fish eating little fish. And as it turns out, even the biggest fish have been having some difficulties lately—"

"Yeah, not a surprise, if they've been writing spaceship loans," snorted Mickey.

"—and, to cut a long story short, it's amazing what you can pick up for pennies on the pound, if you know where to look." He smirked triumphantly while Jack flipped to the bottom of the stack, to ownership papers made out in the name of Vassily Turlough.

Martha and Lethbridge-Stewart set down drinks, and dragged chairs over. "Sir Alastair," Sarah said, "we're out of luck."

Jack passed over the papers; the Brigadier read them and grumbled. "Dare I ask what else you've salvaged from receivership, Mr. Turlough?"

"Oh, this and that. I sold the American properties on to a historical buildings conservancy. But I'm keeping the Hyderabad office building. And warehouse—with its contents."

Jack thought of Carbry's London warehouse, piled high with coffee and silk and grand pianos. "Including a cargo transmat?"

"And enough goods to cover—" Turlough's face fell. "Well. Maybe half of the fines I'll be liable for. But it should keep me afloat."

The Doctor spoke, carefully toneless. "You're going to back to Trion, then?"

Turlough nodded. "I've negotiated a confessional resolution— a plea bargain, essentially—with the judicial custodians. They won't pursue criminal penalties, and I'll take an official reprimand." He rolled his empty pint glass between his palms. "It will bar me from ever taking the oath of service; I can't pursue a political career again, or a military one. That's rather a big deal on Trion."

"Doesn't sound like much of a loss," said Jack. "Suits with epaulettes—you're better off without them."

Turlough smiled fleetingly. "There's also the matter of several million corpira in fines. I'll have to sell the flat and sleep on my ship for a while; and I'll almost certainly have to trade the ship in on something cheaper." He shrugged. "She's not really built for cargo anyway."

The Doctor arched his eyebrows. "You planning on getting into the freight business?"

"Staying in it. Despina was financing the whole Trion end of her empire on tea. It's a lucrative trade—"

"—tea?"

"—and I've already got warehousing here, and a whole sales network on the Trion end. I'm not selling anything sensitive on the Terran market," he clarified. "Just carbon gems; it's not like an influx of cheap diamonds will hurt anyone but DeBeers."

"Tea," mused the Doctor. "How very respectable of you."  
      
"I'll make up for it in my private life, I promise you." They exchanged a look that Jack had to look away from; he was sure he'd worn it himself on occasion.

"When you go back..." Martha reached across the table to pat Jack's hand. "Can you see that the Turlough militia are recognized, for their part against the Tractators? As the Thane, I mean?"

"Actually, the title's another thing I'll need to give up," said Turlough. "But I'll make sure Malkon does."

"Of course; thank you." Martha went on, graver: "Unofficially—can you convey our personal regards to the family of one of your pilots? I never got his surname—a man called Sunny, of the _Governor's Star._ He lost his ship and his life defending us, and the planet. I'd like his family to know."

She squeezed Jack's hand, rather harder than she needed to. "A good man," Jack agreed. "We're grateful for his sacrifice."

"I'll see to it," said Turlough, and that was the end of it, for a while. But at closing time, they all adjourned to the Master's ship, to drink up her liquor cabinet before Turlough was constrained to sell it, and Martha fell into step with him. "Don't you ever take a moment to mourn?"

"Did you?" She was silent. "When you were walking the Earth, when every person—every city, every _nation_ you met—was being bombed into dust behind you, did you stop to mourn every one of them?"

It wasn't fair—it wasn't what they did, to argue with That Year, to attack with it—and he didn't have to look at her face to know he'd hurt her. "Afterward," she protested. "I did. Why do you think I left, after that?"

_Left _needed no context, between them. "And I can't leave, any more than the Doctor can. This is my life now. Every person I meet, I will outlive. Every person I love, if I stay with them, sooner or later, I will watch them die. All of them," he said. "All of you.

"I don't have that much grief in me."

"And so you don't grieve anyone? Not Sunny, not Owen? Not _Tosh? _Jack, how long can you keep this up?"

"Long enough," Jack said, quellingly. "Long enough to deal, in my own way, in my own time. That's one thing I'm not short of." He laid a hand on her shoulder in mute apology. "I'll be all right."

"If you say so." But she smiled; apology accepted.

"Now come on, before they drink up all the good stuff." He swept her up in the folds of his coat and ran down the hill to the ship, to where Ianto waited on the gangway.  
    

~*~

Turlough had been quite sure he was sober, mostly, when they'd left the pub; but either he'd somehow got drunker on the ramble out to the landing site, or else Despina's galley had grown a lot more cabinets. Several of them were impervious to all his keys and all Sarah Jane's, but the drinks locker eventually sprang open to reveal a gratifying expanse of bottles.

They carried out anything that was already open, and as many mixers as they could find, and stacked the bottles on the lip of the gangway. Harkness turned off the loading bay light, to bring the stars into view.

They passed the bottles around, Terran wines and Cyrrhenian liqueurs and a few swallows of strong Gheschi mead. The Doctor turned out to be quite a wine critic, once you got him going; Martha insisted on trying everything put before her in the spirit of science. The boy, Luke, had the same impulse, until his mother put her foot down. "I've spent three weeks tracking giant killer insects all over Europe and the galaxy. I would very much like one chance to get completely hammered with my friends without feeling like I am being a bad example to you."

"I don't think you're being a bad example," Luke protested.

"No, but I will be being a bad parent if I let you drink—" she squinted at the bottle, but it was labeled in Androzanian— "drink alien green stuff when I'm not competent enough to keep an eye on you. Which I think I'm already not." She squeezed his shoulders. "So I need to ask you keep an eye on yourself tonight. Will you do that?"  

Luke agreed. He hadn't outgrown the thrill at being given a new  responsibility, even an unpleasant one, thought Turlough; and then he thought of what awaited him on Trion, and wondered if one ever really outgrew it.

"Nice of Daine," he observed. "Letting me turn myself in."

"When are you taking off?" Ianto asked. He passed Luke a few bottles—the ones they'd determined, by taste and experience, to be largely non-psychoactive.

"That's pure moressi attar there—that stuff's fifty corpiras the sip back home." Turlough groped for a jug of Minimar water and shoved it into the boy's hands. "Dilute it with something, unless you're trying to surpass our last few emperors in decadence."

Martha perked up, more at the mixer than the decadence, and peered over Luke's shoulder while he poured attar drop by drop into one of Despina's good snifters full of water. "You were always the one who hid in the kitchen at parties and made everyone else try your blender drinks, weren't you?" said Jack

"Probably tomorrow," Turlough answered the sky, having temporarily forgotten who had asked him. "I don't suppose there'll be a reason to stick around."

"We've rented a car, Jack and I," Ianto said. "We're driving back to Wales. And Mickey, I think."

"Mickey! Weevil hunt!" Jack reached down and shook his shoulder. "You in?"

Mickey was sprawled against the base of the gangway. "Think I'm going to be spending some time up north for a while, actually," he said, rather smugly.

"Laura?" asked Sarah. To Jack, she explained, "Short, blond, good survival instincts."

"Not a bad type to have," said Mickey.

Ianto looked up from his consultation with Martha; they both had a look of mixological calculation about them. "Whose type is this?"

Turlough looked down at the Doctor, head to head with Lethbridge-Stewart and deep into reminiscence of old times, old friends. "Several people's, I think." Jack followed his gaze, and then leered up at Ianto, fondly and deliberately.

Martha handed round glasses of something experimental, and the subject was dropped, but drunken conversation tended ever toward the circular, in Turlough's experience. Mickey received a text from Laura and made some very hasty farewells; Luke drifted into the Doctor and the Brigadier's conversation, which seemed now to mostly be about music, and books Turlough hadn't read. Ianto went back into the galley to hunt up more mixers, leaving Sarah and Martha sprawled along one side of the gangway, and Jack and Turlough on the other.

Martha was the one who said it, looking from Turlough to Jack and turning her ring on her finger. "So is it better? To have—well. To know?" Her quick glance at the Doctor was longing and bitter, and superfluous.

"You already know," said Jack. "He loves you best—both of you."

"That's not an answer, Jack," said Martha. Sarah opined, "He's got a funny way of showing it. All of him."

Noises echoed from inside the ship—a door, heels ringing on deckplates. "'He never touches anyone, except to distract him from someone else,'" Turlough repeated. "The Master told me that."

"And what about you," Jack said, "going back for seconds before everyone else had got their firsts. That's not fair."

"Fair doesn't enter into it," said Sarah. "He loves who he loves, and he—well."

"Sometimes they even overlap." Jack had a far-away look.

More noises from within, rippling through the hull this time, and Ianto appeared, arms full of bottles. "If I could hear you all the way from the galley, I shudder to think how much of this conversation the Doctor has heard." They all looked guiltily down the gangway, but the Doctor was still deep in a discussion of Harry Potter with Luke.

Lethbridge-Stewart looked like he'd been listening to every word, though; Sarah mouthed "Sorry," and then giggled. "Trip to HQ should be fun," she whispered to Martha, which set her off, too.

Ianto pulled away from Jack in mock affront. "I am not wearing that coat again."

.

The stars spun on toward dawn, and the bottles emptied, and eventually the Brigadier detailed a soldier to stand guard on the ship and stalked back off to his room in the village. Turlough followed him, only tripping a few times on his own feet. He'd been sorely tempted to crash on board with the others, but they'd already claimed all the bunks, and Turlough wasn't young enough to sleep off a night like that on the floor—or in the brig, which was just as bad. But he dragged himself back out to the landing site far too early the next day; the mobile HQ was packing up, and Martha and Jack and their crew were unloading their things from the ship—and cleaning up the party debris, which was terribly decent of them—and then there was nothing left for any of them to do but say their farewells.  
      
Jack and Ianto went first. Ianto loaded their bags into an electric blue convertible—heaven only knew where Jack had managed to rent it— and they exchanged handshakes (Ianto) and bear hugs and kisses (Jack) all around. The Doctor got all three from Jack, plus a salute.

Jack hugged Turlough last, and tucked a card with a stylized T into Turlough's pocket. "We operate out of Cardiff," he said. It was an invitation—and one he suspected might include Ianto. There was too much potential for drama there, Turlough thought; and then he caught sight of the Doctor and almost laughed.  

"I'll keep that in mind," he said instead.

They drove away much too fast, Jack at the wheel. The UNIT troops got the HQ trailer back on the road, and their jeeps followed in convoy. Colonel Mace rode shotgun in the first one, frown deeply engraved. "I am rather glad to be retired," observed Lethbridge-Stewart. "I don't envy him the report he's just had to make."

A soldier drove up with a commandeered jeep and surrendered the keys to the Brigadier. "We'll give Harry your love," Sarah said, embracing the Doctor. Martha, when her turn came, pressed a card into the Doctor's hand. "Now, I know it's not engraved or anything—" in fact, it was printed on UNIT letterhead, folded twice over—"but it has the time and place. So I want to see you there," she said sternly.

The Doctor stared down at the invitation. "Will—who else have you invited?"

Martha shook her head. "She'll still be in Africa, Doctor. We're taking care of her. Trust me. And come to my wedding."

The Doctor nodded. "All right." He kept nodding, as if trying to impress a_ yes_ into his mind, even as he glanced over his shoulder, through the outskirts of the village, straight to where the TARDIS stood.  
      
And then it was more handshakes as the Doctor made his goodbyes, hasty as ever. It didn't bother Turlough, not really—they'd been saying goodbye for a week; there was no need for anything but the words now. "Good-bye, Doctor," he said. "Travel well. Find someone to take with you."  
      
The Doctor shook his head at that, but all he said was "Name a blend of tea after me; I'll come by and have a cup someday."  
      
The day could be long after he was dead and Malkon's children were running the business, but Turlough rather thought he would. He watched the Doctor retreat down the road, coat flapping, dust leaping at his heels.  
      
Martha came up silently beside him. She really was tiny, when she wasn't speaking. She silently offered him another folded card, and watched him read it, though he knew what it said. "There's a lot of us on Earth, you know," she said. "People who've traveled with him. If you want to meet more of us—well. A lot of them will be there."  
      
"It's a rather exclusive club," Lethbridge-Stewart added. He offered his hand. "Well, best of luck with the trial. Don't doubt you'll do fine."  
      
"Thank you, sir. And, thank you, Martha." He tucked the invitation into his pocket. "If I'm on Earth, I will come—I know that's not a proper RSVP—"  
      
"It's as proper as I can get from most of the guest list," she laughed. And then they were off as well, and Turlough was alone, in the middle of an empty road, looking down at his ship with its single sentry.  
      
It was Sergeant Patel, as it turned out. "Got stuck with clean-up duty, did you?"  
      
"Yeah. The rest of my team's down the mine, making sure none of those Tractators got away. Carnot's group pulled the moonbase cleanup." He sounded disappointed. Thank heaven, whatever lay in store for Turlough, it was not a life where a trip to a ghastly industrial moonbase was an exotic perq.  
      
"Do thank them for me—and tell your higher-ups I'm willing to extend UNIT docking privileges in exchange." Turlough didn't actually have title to the moonbase— he hadn't been able to track down which of Despex's creditors had walked off with it—but he thought he had a good chance of finding it before UNIT's accountants did.  
      
He walked the ship making his take-off inventory. Fuel, sufficient; engine status, good; volatiles inventory, adequate. Control systems in good repair; medical bay covered with sticky labels in Martha Jones's neat English handwriting, but otherwise restored to order.  
      
The freezers were full of food, though the party or the cleanup had disarranged the galley in some obscure way. And the crew cabins were all topsy-turvy, with beds hastily remade and cabinets still hanging open; it took Turlough a second walkthrough to find the thing that had nagged at him. Despina's cabin safe was gone from its wall niche. There were marks of a pry bar on the bulkhead.  
      
Turlough thought about the noises from onboard ship last night, and how they had echoed. Thought about how the ship hadn't been empty since; and about how one, tell-tale sound would have rung out clear and unmistakable to that terribly exclusive club.  
      
He went back to the galley. There were still too many cabinets; and one of them still wouldn't open to any of the ship's keys.

"Despina," said Turlough.  "I know you're there."

The cabinet door opened, inward, with a familiar sound. Inside was big and bright; Despina's safe stood open in the middle of the console room. "My dear Turlough. Do come in." She was all in black, as ever, but affecting no feminine trappings: her hair was pulled sharply back, and her long tailed coat buttoned to the chin.

"Thanks, but I'll stay right here, if you don't mind." He leaned on the counter, trying to look casual. "How long have you been here?"

"Since last night. I overheard your fascinating conversation—I must say I'm gratified that you took my words to heart." She circled the console, setting and locking the destination parameters. Preparing to flee. "Where is the Doctor?"  

"He left. Just now."  

"Naturally," the Master huffed. "It's what he does."

There was no answer to that; she wasn't wrong. "And why are you still here?" said Turlough instead.

"To collect a few things." She gestured to the safe; her ring was back on her hand, worn outside the glove now. "And, of course, to see you."

"I don't think we have anything left to say to each other." The galley was space-ready; there was nothing ready to hand on the counter, nothing sharp or heavy or even just loud.

"Oh, but I never had the chance to finish my story." She leaned on the console and spread her hands behind her, mimicking Turlough's posture. "Don't tell me you aren't curious about how it ends."  

It was the story the Doctor wouldn't tell, or one of them. "If you want to talk, talk."

She arched her eyebrows. "You never used to be such a demanding audience. But very well. I crossed paths with the Doctor during his exile on Earth." It was almost the tone the Doctor had used, back in Despina's stateroom: flat and challenging. "He's told you about that, I hope?"

"Some." Turlough shrugged with one shoulder. "Though less than I've heard from Lethbridge-Stewart just this week."

He smiled conspiratorially; and she matched the look. "Between us, I believe the Time Lords might have sent him there as a pawn against me. I may have been somewhat... indiscreet with my plans." So this was the game they were playing—one-upping each other not just with privileged knowledge, but with revelation.

Turlough wondered if there was anything he could have shared with the Doctor that would have inspired the same frankness.

"Well. We saw rather a lot of each other, in those days. Timestream entanglement—a TARDIS will take you to place it remembers, or a person. Particularly if you're as poor a pilot as the Doctor was in those days.

"So imagine my surprise when he sought me out on purpose—and found me, though I shudder to think how many false starts he must have made." She chuckled warmly. "We met in Venice; I was in the retinue of the Doge, investigating certain alchemical researches—purely for scientific interest, you understand; no danger in any of it—"

"Oh, certainly not."  

"—and for once in his lives, the Doctor agreed with me. And yet he wouldn't let me be; it was like being at school again."

"Really? Now I had always pictured you as the hanger-on."

The Master stood up straight, nostrils flaring. "If you would prefer to tell this story yourself, I needn't finish."

"Oh, no, go on." Her face was flushed redder than he'd seen it before. She had never let him get this far under her skin, on so little provocation; and she had not been well-balanced before her trip through the Time Locks.

"Thank you. As I was saying—the Doctor sought out my company. And we kept company—" her lips curved around the euphemism—"for no little time, before he finally deigned to tell me about dear Miss Grant."

She paused, as though Turlough were expected to know more of the woman than just her name. "His traveling companion?"

"The UNIT agent assigned to assist him. Josephine Grant. I was rather fond of her myself—she was really quite charming. So brave. So loyal. So quick to chase after anything in trousers, and even quicker to drop the poor sods the moment the Doctor called." She tutted under her breath. "She was really quite devoted. I believe the Doctor was actually surprised when she married.

"Well. I laughed in his face, and he stormed off to his TARDIS, and that was the last Venice saw of him. But when I attempted to apply the fruits of my researches, on Carcarrica Prime, who should I find waiting for me but the Doctor, one step ahead of me."

"It was a reasonable place to look," allowed Turlough, who knew nothing of Carcarrica beyond its galactic coordinates. "Even theoretical alchemy isn't exactly a popular subject."

"True." Turlough held in his sigh. "It was a logical deduction. The first of many such. My little laboratory on Carcarrica, my judicial appointment on Herculon, my mercenary fleet off the Arjun Drift-- every time I had some matter in hand, the Doctor would be there to put a stop to it."

"Yes," said Turlough, "I've seen him do it."

"You never saw either of us in our prime, boy. We were—" she shook her head. "We were young, and the universe lay at our feet. And its conquest—or the conquest of whatever portion of the universe I could effectively rule—was my sole object. The Doctor objected—on purely philosophical grounds, you understand—"

"Naturally."

"—and he tried to keep me from it. I came to expect him—to lay little traps, just for his benefit, in all my endeavors. And, I confess, the Doctor defeated me quite fairly—oh, more than once.

"But I almost didn't mind, at least the first few times.  Because it _was _almost like being at school again— the give and take, the... adversarial struggle to perfect one's argument—and the winner, claiming his prize afterward. I had missed that part more than I cared to let on." She recalled herself to the present, caught Turlough's eye in shameless conspiracy.

"Now I always intended to be magnanimous in victory. I would have laid half of creation at the Doctor's feet—let him share in my triumphs. The Doctor, on the other hand, confused _magnanimity _with _mercy._ He did not understand that, while one of these is a virtue, the other is—a failing. And one he still suffers from.

"So I set out to demonstrate the limitations of mercy.

"I laid a neat little trap aboard the Kreighnon Ancillarium. Rather after your time, I think; it's a deep-space installation of the Terran Imperium. I had operatives in place on every planet of twelve systems, all of them ready to move into position on one signal—the failure of the Ancillarium's navigational beacon.

"I dragged an Ogron ship across the Doctor's trail, and they led him a merry chase to the station, assembling a bomb from components scattered across an asteroid belt and trying to smuggle it in with a volatiles cargo, all quite tedious and simple. I didn't even need to be on hand to watch the Doctor foil it single-handedly. In fact I made sure I wasn't; it would have made me quite sick to watch.

"But he tracked me down planetside, in my bunker on Kreighnon Alpha, to tell me he'd rumbled my scheme. Said he'd refrain from turning me in to the Imperial authorities—there's that streak of mercy again—just told me to clear out and leave the planet. And then he smiled, in that frightfully arrogant way he had—" the Master's tone was beyond lascivious—"and suggested we celebrate his victory in what by then was rapidly becoming our customary way."

Turlough could almost see the other man looking out through Despina's face, the past lives jostling for primacy behind her eyes. The Doctor had had that look, though rarely; it had never frightened him as deeply as it did now. "Letting him win, were you?" he said. The light words scraped in his dry throat, but they brought Despina—_his _Master; the only one he felt any confidence with—back to the surface.

"I'm sure you'd know all about that," she snapped. "You'd think he would grow tired of unearned victories. Hubristic fool." She smiled fondly. "So. Whilst we were... celebrating... the_ real _bomb, the one I'd gone back to the station's construction to implant in its very skeleton, detected the time-trace of the Doctor's TARDIS and quietly counted down to detonation. Total military control of twelve systems, delivered into my hands," she purred, "just as I was delivered in the Doctor's."

The Master leveled a look at him: mad, beaming, proud. Waiting for some acknowledgement. "How many people were on that base?"

She snorted. "You know, that's exactly what the Doctor said. Oh, he was angry! But he didn't make a grab for my sidearm—no, not the Doctor." She leaned forward to whisper across the TARDIS doorway, fingertips drumming on the console edge. "He didn't even try his Venusian aikido. He went straight for my throat." She spanned her neck in her outstretched fingers, smiling at the memory. "Leapt for me and did his best to choke the life out of me—as though it mattered to the dead where he put his hands—my throat, my... well. It didn't seem to matter much to him, either." She waggled her brow in a motion he hadn't thought Despina's face capable of. "Not what you wanted to hear of your Doctor, is it?"

"Not—" he cleared his throat and tried again. "Not what I expected."

"It was exactly what I had expected. What I had planned. I knew—oh, for lifetimes, I knew—that if I could cut under all his damnable mercies, I could make him touch me, and not think of anyone else.

"And I did. I won." A beatific smile lit up her face, then lost its mirth as Turlough merely stared. "Well? Say it, whatever it is you're thinking."

_You're mad_ seemed imprudent. "A Gallifreyan body would have regenerated," Turlough said. The Time Locks had shaken her mind, but the stolen human synapses had given it no space to settle out again.

"Clever of me to have ditched mine, then, wasn't it?"  Her eyes focused on nothing. "That was the second time I won. It gets harder, you see, each time. We keeping learning each other's game..."

She shook her head, straightened her back. "Tell him that, from me."

And that, of all things, made him want to laugh. "Tell the Doctor—"

"When you see him—oh, you will," she cut him off. "He hovers over this planet like a carrion fly. Entangled timestreams, hm? You'll see him before I will.

"And when you do—just remind him of that. That he has forgiven me for killing, and forgiven me for dying, but that even his mercy is not infinite. And that there is one thing I can do that he cannot twist into a victory."

Her face was shuttered. Turlough looked past her, though her—the console room of her TARDIS, her brand new TARDIS, was pristine and empty. The rescued flotsam they had seen from the temporal observatory was gone.

"You've already started." Blood sounded in Turlough's ears. "Rebuilding Gallifrey. You're really going to do it."

"Tell the Doctor," she repeated. "I think he'll be very interested to know. Don't you?" She glanced at the readouts behind her, suddenly all business. "There'll be a place for you there. I need people about me I can trust." She swiped a dust speck from the core housing. "No? I attained your cooperation through deceit at first, but I think I've just shown we can be honest with each other."

"I don't—think I much care for your brand of honesty." It was pathetic bravado, but reflexive contempt washed over the Master's face, and Turlough decided weakness was probably the right tack after all.

"Then step away from the doors," she said, and turned her back, utterly unworried. Well, she'd seen the state of the galley; there was nothing to throw. "Goodbye, Turlough." She threw the lever, and the doors folded in around her straight, black back.

The air shuddered, and the familiar sound of dematerialization rang through the hull, and then Turlough was facing a wall of kitchen cabinets, no more nor less than should have been there.

Footfalls thudded up the ramp, and down the corridors. "What's with the noise?" Sergeant Patel hung panting against the doorframe.

"Just the Master. Oh, don't worry; she's gone now."

"Oh." Patel lowered his weapon apologetically. "I'll just be outside, then."  
      
"Actually, Sergeant, you might as well leave. Get a few hundred yards back; I think I'm ready to start the launch sequence."

"Ah. Going up to the moon, then?"

He'd have to, at least for a while; transmat to Hyderabad, get the cargo transferred moonside, and then load it onto the ship—oh. That was a problem. "I don't suppose UNIT would look the other way if I hired human stevedores to sling cargo in the moonbase."

"Doubt it." He glanced over his shoulder, down the empty corridor. "Though, if it was just me and my team—you know, doing a favor for the locals. Some of us wouldn't mind getting back up there."

"Enough to work cargo? Maybe I should set up a tourist resort."

"People'd pay. Besides, it's not like anything weighs much up there—here, you could bill it as a health spa! Lose seven-eighths of your body weight or your money back."

It was an old joke, but Turlough laughed more than it deserved; it helped clear his head of the Master's echoing last request. "Wouldn't be worth the liability insurance. I'll just have to import freight robots. Or have them built here." They came to the gangway; Turlough took down the broom from its wall bracket and swept the inner hull curve clean of detritus—heather, ants. Pieces of the earth. "Really, what I need is to hire an Earthside manager to take care of that sort of thing. Or bring one in as a partner; I don't think I could make payroll just yet. Do you like your job?"

Patel smiled before answering, the sort of smile that made the answer superfluous. "Wouldn't mind another trip to the moon, but, yeah. Sorry." He shrugged; he had rather nice shoulders, really. "There are plenty of people who don't, though. You'll find someone." And nice eyes—and there he'd caught Turlough staring. "I'll just, ah, leave you to it, then."

He backed down the ramp and took off up the slope at an easy jog, always keeping the ship in his sight. The Doctor should have taken that one with him, Turlough thought. He sealed the gangway and climbed up to the bridge; the viewscreen showed Patel loitering at the roadside, waiting for the launch, face already turned skyward.

Well. He could at least give him a trip to the moon; it would solve his cargo problem in the short term.

In the long term... in the long term, the Master was building some grotesque parody of Gallifrey; and the Doctor had vanished again, before he had to hear about it; and Turlough was about to give up his title and his home and his ship to atone for her crimes; and his future was riding on a single profitable run.

But he had a fast ship, and a warehouse full of tea and treasures, and—he touched the invitation in his pocket—an entree into the most exclusive club on Earth. If he needed a partner— well. One could hardly look in a better place.

Turlough strapped himself in to the pilot's seat, and watched the tell-tales light up green around him.  "I wonder," he said, "what Tegan's up to these days."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Trigger warnings: One character has an offstage dubcon-to-noncon encounter involving forcible restraint. There are also references to a character's past underaged sexual experiences, including some very skeezy harassment by persons in authority.]


End file.
